The Journal of Finance

The Journal of Finance publishes leading research across all the major fields of finance. It is one of the most widely cited journals in academic finance, and in all of economics. Each of the six issues per year reaches over 8,000 academics, finance professionals, libraries, and government and financial institutions around the world. The journal is the official publication of The American Finance Association, the premier academic organization devoted to the study and promotion of knowledge about financial economics.

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Determinants of Secondary Market Prices for Developing Country Syndicated Loans

Published: 12/01/1990   |   DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-6261.1990.tb03726.x

EKKEHART BOEHMER, WILLIAM L. MEGGINSON

This paper presents our investigation of the factors that determine secondary market prices of developing country syndicated loans. Trading volume in this market has almost doubled yearly from 1985 to 1988 while average market prices declined from 73% to 41% of par value during the same period. We find that loan values depend on a country's solvency rather than its liquidity and show that a country's adoption of a debt conversion program significantly decreases its loans' market prices. Furthermore, the debt moratoria by Brazil and Peru, as well as the developing‐country‐specific provisions made by U.S. banks, impact loan prices negatively.


Lifting the Veil: An Analysis of Pre‐trade Transparency at the NYSE

Published: 03/02/2005   |   DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-6261.2005.00746.x

EKKEHART BOEHMER, GIDEON SAAR, LEI YU

We study pre‐trade transparency by looking at the introduction of NYSE's OpenBook service that provides limit‐order book information to traders off the exchange floor. We find that traders attempt to manage limit‐order exposure: They submit smaller orders and cancel orders faster. Specialists' participation rate and the depth they add to the quote decline. Liquidity increases in that the price impact of orders declines, and we find some improvement in the informational efficiency of prices. These results suggest that an increase in pre‐trade transparency affects investors' trading strategies and can improve certain dimensions of market quality.


Which Shorts Are Informed?

Published: 04/01/2008   |   DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-6261.2008.01324.x

EKKEHART BOEHMER, CHARLES M. JONES, XIAOYAN ZHANG

We construct a long daily panel of short sales using proprietary NYSE order data. From 2000 to 2004, shorting accounts for more than 12.9% of NYSE volume, suggesting that shorting constraints are not widespread. As a group, these short sellers are well informed. Heavily shorted stocks underperform lightly shorted stocks by a risk‐adjusted average of 1.16% over the following 20 trading days (15.6% annualized). Institutional nonprogram short sales are the most informative; stocks heavily shorted by institutions underperform by 1.43% the next month (19.6% annualized). The results indicate that, on average, short sellers are important contributors to efficient stock prices.


Tracking Retail Investor Activity

Published: 04/28/2021   |   DOI: 10.1111/jofi.13033

EKKEHART BOEHMER, CHARLES M. JONES, XIAOYAN ZHANG, XINRAN ZHANG

We provide an easy method to identify marketable retail purchases and sales using recent, publicly available U.S. equity transactions data. Individual stocks with net buying by retail investors outperform stocks with negative imbalances by approximately 10 bps over the following week. Less than half of the predictive power of marketable retail order imbalance is attributable to order flow persistence, while the rest cannot be explained by contrarian trading (proxy for liquidity provision) or public news sentiment. There is suggestive, but only suggestive, evidence that retail marketable orders might contain firm‐level information that is not yet incorporated into prices.