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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Transparency and Liquidity: A Comparison of Auction and Dealer Markets with Informed Trading
Published: 06/01/1996 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-6261.1996.tb02695.x
MARCO PAGANO, AILSA RÖELL
Trading systems differ in their degree of transparency, here defined as the extent to which market makers can observe the size and direction of the current order flow. We investigate whether greater transparency enhances market liquidity by reducing the opportunities for taking advantage of uninformed participants. We compare the price formation process in several stylized trading systems with different degrees of transparency: various types of auction markets and a stylized dealer market. We find that greater transparency generates lower trading costs for uninformed traders on average, although not necessarily for every size of trade.
Information Sharing in Credit Markets
Published: 12/01/1993 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-6261.1993.tb05125.x
MARCO PAGANO, TULLIO JAPPELLI
We present a model with adverse selection where information sharing between lenders arises endogenously. Lenders' incentives to share information about borrowers are positively related to the mobility and heterogeneity of borrowers, to the size of the credit market, and to advances in information technology; such incentives are instead reduced by the fear of competition from potential entrants. In addition, information sharing increases the volume of lending when adverse selection is so severe that safe borrowers drop out of the market. These predictions are supported by international and historical evidence in the context of the consumer credit market.
Short‐Selling Bans Around the World: Evidence from the 2007–09 Crisis
Published: 12/27/2012 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-6261.2012.01802.x
ALESSANDRO BEBER, MARCO PAGANO
Most regulators around the world reacted to the 2007–09 crisis by imposing bans on short selling. These were imposed and lifted at different dates in different countries, often targeted different sets of stocks, and featured varying degrees of stringency. We exploit this variation in short‐sales regimes to identify their effects on liquidity, price discovery, and stock prices. Using panel and matching techniques, we find that bans (i) were detrimental for liquidity, especially for stocks with small capitalization and no listed options; (ii) slowed price discovery, especially in bear markets, and (iii) failed to support prices, except possibly for U.S. financial stocks.
Why Do Companies Go Public? An Empirical Analysis
Published: 12/17/2002 | DOI: 10.1111/0022-1082.25448
Marco Pagano, Fabio Panetta, Luigi Zingales
Using a large database of private firms in Italy, we analyze the determinants of initial public offerings (IPOs) by comparing the ex ante and ex post characteristics of IPOs with those of private firms. The likelihood of an IPO is increasing in the company's size and the industry's market‐to‐book ratio. Companies appear to go public not to finance future investments and growth, but to rebalance their accounts after high investment and growth. IPOs are also followed by lower cost of credit and increased turnover in control.
Collateral Constraints and the Law of One Price: An Experiment
Published: 09/28/2018 | DOI: 10.1111/jofi.12722
MARCO CIPRIANI, ANA FOSTEL, DANIEL HOUSER
We test the asset pricing implications of collateralized borrowing (that is, of using assets as collateral to borrow money) in the laboratory. To this purpose, we develop a general equilibrium model with collateral constraints amenable to laboratory implementation and gather experimental data. In the laboratory, assets that can be leveraged fetch higher prices than assets that cannot, even though assets' payoffs are identical in all states of the world. Collateral value, therefore, creates deviations from the Law of One Price. The spread between collateralizeable and noncollateralizeable assets is significant and quantitatively close to theoretical predictions.
Local Crowding‐Out in China
Published: 07/26/2020 | DOI: 10.1111/jofi.12966
YI HUANG, MARCO PAGANO, UGO PANIZZA
In China, between 2006 and 2013, local public debt crowded out the investment of private firms by tightening their funding constraints while leaving state‐owned firms' investment unaffected. We establish this result using a purpose‐built data set for Chinese local public debt. Private firms invest less in cities with more public debt, with the reduction in investment larger for firms located farther from banks in other cities or more dependent on external funding. Moreover, in cities where public debt is high, private firms' investment is more sensitive to internal cash flow.
Local Experiences, Search, and Spillovers in the Housing Market
Published: 02/06/2023 | DOI: 10.1111/jofi.13208
ANTONIO GARGANO, MARCO GIACOLETTI, ELVIS JARNECIC
Recent local price growth explains differences in search behavior across prospective homebuyers. Those experiencing higher growth in their postcode of residence search more broadly across locations and house characteristics, without changing attention devoted to individual sales listings, and have shorter search duration. Effects are stronger for homeowners, in particular those living in less wealthy areas and looking for a new primary residence. We use reduced‐form analysis and a quantitative equilibrium model to show that the expansion of search breadth translates into widespread spillovers onto house sales prices and inventories of listings across postcodes within a metropolitan area.
Stock Market Returns and Consumption
Published: 07/27/2020 | DOI: 10.1111/jofi.12968
MARCO DI MAGGIO, AMIR KERMANI, KAVEH MAJLESI
This paper employs Swedish data on households' stock holdings to investigate how consumption responds to changes in stock market returns. We instrument the actual capital gains and dividend payments with past portfolio weights. Unrealized capital gains lead to a marginal propensity to consume of 23% for the bottom 50% of the wealth distribution and about 3% for the top 30% of the wealth distribution. Household consumption is significantly more responsive to dividend payouts across all parts of the wealth distribution. Our findings are consistent with households treating capital gains and dividends as separate sources of income.
The Geography of Equity Listing: Why Do Companies List Abroad?
Published: 12/17/2002 | DOI: 10.1111/1540-6261.00509
Marco Pagano, Ailsa A. Röell, Josef Zechner
This paper documents aggregate trends in the foreign listings of companies, and analyzes their distinctive prelisting characteristics and postlisting performance. In 1986–1997, many European companies listed abroad, mainly on U.S. exchanges, while the number of U.S. companies listed in Europe decreased. European companies that cross‐list tend to be large and recently privatized firms, and expand their foreign sales after listing abroad. They differ sharply depending on where they cross‐list: The U.S. exchanges attract high‐tech and export‐oriented companies that expand rapidly without significant leveraging. Companies cross‐listing within Europe do not grow unusually fast, and increase their leverage after cross‐listing.
Learning From Disagreement in the U.S. Treasury Bond Market
Published: 07/27/2020 | DOI: 10.1111/jofi.12971
MARCO GIACOLETTI, KRISTOFFER T. LAURSEN, KENNETH J. SINGLETON
We study risk premiums in the U.S. Treasury bond market from the perspective of a Bayesian econometrician BLwho learns in real time from disagreement among investors about future bond yields. Notably, disagreement has substantial predictive power for yields, and BL's risk premiums are less volatile than those in the analogous model without learning. BL's forecasts are substantially more accurate than the consensus forecasts of market professionals, particularly following U.S. recessions. The predictive power of disagreement is distinct from the (much weaker) one of inflation and output growth. Rather, it appears to reflect uncertainty about future fiscal policy.
Brokers and Order Flow Leakage: Evidence from Fire Sales
Published: 08/09/2019 | DOI: 10.1111/jofi.12840
ANDREA BARBON, MARCO DI MAGGIO, FRANCESCO FRANZONI, AUGUSTIN LANDIER
Using trade‐level data, we study whether brokers play a role in spreading order flow information in the stock market. We focus on large portfolio liquidations that result in temporary price drops, and identify the brokers who intermediate these trades. These brokers’ clients are more likely to predate on the liquidating funds than to provide liquidity. Predation leads to profits of about 25 basis points over 10 days and increases the liquidation costs of the distressed fund by 40%. This evidence suggests a role of information leakage in exacerbating fire sales.
Debt Maturity, Risk, and Asymmetric Information
Published: 11/10/2005 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-6261.2005.00820.x
ALLEN N. BERGER, MARCO A. ESPINOSA‐VEGA, W. SCOTT FRAME, NATHAN H. MILLER
We test the implications of Flannery's (1986) and Diamond's (1991) models concerning the effects of risk and asymmetric information in determining debt maturity, and we examine the overall importance of informational asymmetries in debt maturity choices. We employ data on over 6,000 commercial loans from 53 large U.S. banks. Our results for low‐risk firms are consistent with the predictions of both theoretical models, but our findings for high‐risk firms conflict with the predictions of Diamond's model and with much of the empirical literature. Our findings also suggest a strong quantitative role for asymmetric information in explaining debt maturity.