Essays in asset pricing with anticipative information

This thesis focuses on private information dissemination and its impacts on financial markets. Specifically, we study issues arising when there are skilled individuals able to extract anticipative information about future prices. The first model considers a continuous time economy that is populated by informed and uninformed investors as well as active unskilled investors, and investigates the existence of noisy rational expectations equilibria and their properties. Equilibria are derived in closed form and their properties analyzed. Informed trading is found to reduce price volatility. The second model is based on the idea that besides exploiting their private information for trading purposes, informed agents might want to offer wealth management services to uninformed investors in exchange for a fee. A market for active funds emerges, and the process of anticipative information dissemination is endogenized. In this chapter, heterogenous risk averse investors can invest in the active fund. Low risk tolerance investors are found to be strictly better off with the active fund. Fund size is not a reliable indicator of managerial skill. The market reacts to the manager's increasing risk-taking behavior by reducing the volatility and risk premium