The costs of implementing investment strategies represent a significant drag on the performance of mutual funds and other institutional investors. It is the responsibility of institutional investors, and in the interests of the individual investors they represent, to seek market mechanisms that mitigate trading costs. We investigate an example of one such liquidity provision mechanism whereby liquidity demanders auction a set of trades as a package directly to potential liquidity providers. A critical feature of the auction is that the identities of the securities in the package are not revealed to the bidder. We demonstrate that this mechanism provides a transactions cost savings relative to more traditional trading mechanisms for the liquidity demander as well as an efficient way for liquidity suppliers to obtain order flow. We argue that the cost savings afforded this new mechanism are due to the potential for low cost crosses with the bidder's existing inventory positions and through the longer trading horizon, and superior trading ability, of the bidders. This research suggests that the ability to innovate via new liquidity provision mechanisms can provide market participants with transaction cost savings that cannot be easily duplicated on more traditional exchanges.

We analyze the performance persistence in hedge funds taking into account look-ahead bias (multi-period sampling bias). We model liquidation of hedge funds by analyzing how it depends upon historical performance. Next, we use a weighting procedure that eliminates look-ahead bias in measures for performance persistence. In contrast to earlier results for mutual funds, the impact of look-ahead bias is exacerbated for hedge funds due to their greater level of total risk. At the four-quarter horizon, look-ahead bias can be as much as 3.8%, depending upon the decile of the distribution. We find positive persistence in hedge fund quarterly returns after correcting for investment style. The empirical pattern at the annual level is also consistent with positive persistence, but its statistical significance is weak.

Lockups are agreements made by insiders of stock-issuing firms to abstain from selling shares for a specified period of time after the issue. Brav and Gompers (2003) suggest that lockups are a bonding solution to a moral hazard problem and not a signaling solution to an adverse selection problem. We challenge this conclusion theoretically and empirically. In our model, insiders of good firms signal by putting and keeping (locking up) their money where their mouths are. Our model yields two comparative statics: lockups should be shorter when a firm is i) more transparent and/or ii) more risky. Using a sample of 4,013 initial public offerings and 3,279 seasoned equity offerings between 1988 and 1999, we find empirical support for our theoretical predictions.

The retained earnings hypothesis predicts that stock distributions accounted for by reducing retained earnings are a more credible signal of managerial optimism than stock distributions that do not reduce retained earnings. This study examines the costs of false signaling that are a necessary pre-condition for the hypothesis and finds them to be generally very small, calling the validity of the hypothesis into question for most firms. However, prior studies report broad-based market evidence consistent with the hypothesis. To resolve this apparent inconsistency, the study replicates and extends tests of the retained earnings hypothesis contained in three prior studies, and shows that the findings in support of the retained earnings hypothesis can be attributed to specification and measurement choices that bias the results in favor of the hypothesis. The support for the retained earnings hypothesis is weaker when the sources of the bias are removed. However, some support for the hypothesis remains for a limited set of distributing firms.

I investigate whether changes in stock market participation costs can explain the long-term increase in the number of U.S. stockholders. I separate these costs into two components: an information cost (the cost of collecting market information), and an entry cost (all other costs, including commissions and fees), and disentangle their general equilibrium implications in a noisy rational expectations economy. While a falling information cost cannot explain the observed increase in stock market participation, a falling entry cost can account for this plus several other features of the U.S. economy, including the falling equity premium, rising return variances, and the boom in passive relative to active investing.

This paper studies how the precision of noisy public information that investors receive about the expected aggregate dividend growth rate affects stock market returns. I show that less precise information can increase the risk premium and stock return volatility. The numerical results from my calibrated model also show that noisy information can significantly increase the risk premium and stock return volatility. My finding implies that the presence of noisy information may help explain the large average risk premium and return volatility in the U.S. financial market. In addition, my finding suggests it is optimal for firms to disclose to investors more precise information to reduce the cost of equity capital.

We construct a unique data set that includes all reported institutional block trades on the London Stock Exchange and analyze the market reaction to buy and sell trades. We find that the type of investors behind the trade and the combination of the trade's size and the trader's resulting level of ownership are the major determinants of the information effects and the asymmetry between price impacts of buy and sell trades. In particular, large trades undertaken by fund managers, the most active investors in our sample, have strong information content, while, for the remaining trades, we report limited support for the information and the price impact asymmetry hypotheses. These results hold even after accounting for trade complexity and volatility effects in the regressions.

Using a Monte Carlo simulation, this study addresses the question of how traditional risk measures and immunization strategies perform when the term structure evolves in a Heath-Jarrow-Morton (1992) manner. The results suggest that, for immunization purposes, immunization strategies and portfolio formation strategies are more important than interest rate risk measures. The performance of immunization strategies depends more on the transaction costs and the holding period than on the risk measures. Moreover, the immunization performance of bullet and barbell portfolios is not very sensitive to interest rate risk measures.

We develop a straightforward procedure to price derivatives by a bivariate tree when the underlying process is a jump-diffusion. Probabilities and jump sizes are derived are derived by matching higher order moments or cumulants. We give comparisons with other published results along with convergence proofs and estimates of the order of convergence. The bivariate tree approach is particularly useful for pricing long-term American options and long-term real options because of its robustness and flexibility. We illustrate the pedagogy in an application involving a long-term investment project.