Feedback Effects and the Limits to Arbitrage

Alex Edmans, Itay Goldstein and Wei Jiang

No 17582, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper identifies a limit to arbitrage that arises from the fact that a firm's fundamental value is endogenous to the act of exploiting the arbitrage. Trading on private information reveals this information to managers and helps them improve their real decisions, in turn enhancing fundamental value. While this increases the profitability of a long position, it reduces the profitability of a short position -- selling on negative information reveals that firm prospects are poor, causing the manager to cancel investment. Optimal abandonment increases firm value and may cause the speculator to realize a loss on her initial sale. Thus, investors may strategically refrain from trading on negative information, and so bad news is incorporated more slowly into prices than good news. The effect has potentially important real consequences -- if negative information is not incorporated into stock prices, negative-NPV projects may not be abandoned, leading to overinvestment.

JEL-codes: G14 G34 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cta and nep-ppm
Note: AP CF
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w17582.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Feedback Effects and the Limits to Arbitrage (2014)
Working Paper: Feedback Effects and the Limits to Arbitrage (2011)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:17582

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w17582

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().