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Report
Insider networks
How do insiders respond to regulatory oversight? History suggests that they form sophisticated networks to share information and circumvent regulation. We develop a theory of the formation and regulation of information transmission networks. We show that agents with sufficiently complex networks bypass any given regulatory environment. In response, regulators employ broad regulatory boundaries to combat gaming, giving rise to regulatory ambiguity. Tighter regulation induces agents to migrate transmission activity from existing social networks to a core-periphery insider network. A small group ...
Discussion Paper
Insider Networks
Modern-day financial systems are highly complex, with billions of exchanges in information, assets, and funds between individuals and institutions. Though daunting to operationalize, regulating these transmissions may be desirable in some instances. For example, securities regulators aim to protect investors by tracking and punishing insider trading. Recent evidence shows that insiders have formed sophisticated networksthat enable them to pursue activities outside the purview of regulatory oversight. In understanding the cat-and-mouse game between regulators and insiders, a key consideration ...
Report
Leader-Follower Dynamics in Shareholder Activism
Motivated by the rise of hedge fund activism, we consider a leader blockholder and a follower counterpart who first trade in sequence to build their blocks and then intervene in a firm. With endogenous fundamentals and steering dynamics, the leader ceases to trade in an unpredictable way: she buys or sells to induce the follower to acquire a larger block and thus spend more resources to improve firm value. Key is that the activists have correlated private information—initial blocks, firms' fundamentals, or their own productivity—so that prices either overreact or underreact to order ...