Moral Hazard, Informed Trading, and Stock Prices

Pierre Collin-Dufresne and Vyacheslav Fos

No 19619, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We analyze a model of informed trading where an activist shareholder accumulates shares in an anonymous market and then expends costly effort to increase the firm value. We find that equilibrium prices are affected by the position accumulated by the activist, because the level of effort undertaken is increasing in the size of his acquired position. In equilibrium, price impact has two components: one due to asymmetric information (as in the seminal Kyle (1985) model) and one due to moral hazard (a new source of illiquidity). Price impact is higher the more severe the moral hazard problem, which corresponds to a more productive activist. We thus obtain a trade-off: with more noise trading (less `price efficiency') the activist can build up a larger stake, which leads to more effort expenditure and higher firm value (more `economic efficiency').

JEL-codes: G0 G1 G10 G12 G14 G3 G34 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cta
Note: AP CF
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w19619.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:19619

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w19619

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 ().