IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/aoz/wpaper/355.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Argentina: The Honor Student—By Merit and By Mistake. A Natural Experiment on "Information Effects"

Author

Listed:
  • Oscar Meneses

    (Banco de México)

  • Lorenzo Menna

    (Banco de México)

  • Martín Tobal

    (Banco de México)

Abstract

On January 7, 2025, Argentina’s EMBI spread plunged by over 114 basis points. JP Morgan later revealed that this decline resulted from a technical mistake, creating a rare natural experiment—an exogenous shift in sovereign risk pricing. Because this mistake was unrelated to Argentina’s fundamentals, it provides a unique opportunity to identify the “information effect” of asset prices. Using a Difference-in-Differences approach, we find that Argentine stocks outperformed other emerging markets during the mistake’s window, indicating that investors revised their beliefs about Argentina’s intrinsic asset values based on mispriced signals—consistent with the information effect. Stocks linked to the Vaca Muerta zone rose more sharply, suggesting investors viewed the EMBI drop as an improvement likely to facilitate investment in this major shale and gas reserve.

Suggested Citation

  • Oscar Meneses & Lorenzo Menna & Martín Tobal, 2025. "Argentina: The Honor Student—By Merit and By Mistake. A Natural Experiment on "Information Effects"," Working Papers 355, Red Nacional de Investigadores en Economía (RedNIE).
    • Handle: RePEc:aoz:wpaper:355
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://rednie.eco.unc.edu.ar/files/DT/355.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Robert S. Pindyck & Julio J. Rotemberg, 1993. "The Comovement of Stock Prices," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 108(4), pages 1073-1104.
    2. Bai, Jennie & Philippon, Thomas & Savov, Alexi, 2016. "Have financial markets become more informative?," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 122(3), pages 625-654.
    3. Grossman, Sanford J & Stiglitz, Joseph E, 1980. "On the Impossibility of Informationally Efficient Markets," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 70(3), pages 393-408, June.
    4. Barlevy, Gadi & Veronesi, Pietro, 2003. "Rational panics and stock market crashes," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 110(2), pages 234-263, June.
    5. Olivier Dessaint & Thierry Foucault & Laurent Frésard & Adrien Matray, 2019. "Noisy Stock Prices and Corporate Investment," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 32(7), pages 2625-2672.
    6. Zhong, Zhiyuan & Wu, Qiang & Wang, Manling, 2024. "Does the U.S.-China trade war stop? A novel event study on fake news and stock price in China," Finance Research Letters, Elsevier, vol. 66(C).
    7. Grossman, Sanford J & Stiglitz, Joseph E, 1976. "Information and Competitive Price Systems," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 66(2), pages 246-253, May.
    8. Avdis, Efstathios, 2016. "Information tradeoffs in dynamic financial markets," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 122(3), pages 568-584.
    9. Diamond, Douglas W. & Verrecchia, Robert E., 1981. "Information aggregation in a noisy rational expectations economy," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 9(3), pages 221-235, September.
    10. Admati, Anat R, 1985. "A Noisy Rational Expectations Equilibrium for Multi-asset Securities Markets," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 53(3), pages 629-657, May.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Marcelo Pinheiro, 2005. "Informational asymmetries and a multiplier effect on price correlation and trading," Annals of Finance, Springer, vol. 1(4), pages 395-421, October.
    2. Nicolae Gârleanu & Lasse Heje Pedersen, 2018. "Efficiently Inefficient Markets for Assets and Asset Management," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 73(4), pages 1663-1712, August.
    3. Briana Chang & Harrison Hong, 2017. "Assignment of Stock Market Coverage," NBER Working Papers 23115, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    4. Mäkinen, Taneli & Ohl, Björn, 2015. "Information acquisition and learning from prices over the business cycle," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 158(PB), pages 585-633.
    5. Aliyev, Nihad & Huseynov, Fariz & Rzayev, Khaladdin, 2022. "Algorithmic trading and investment-to-price sensitivity," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 118844, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    6. Ouzan, Samuel, 2020. "Loss aversion and market crashes," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 92(C), pages 70-86.
    7. Arnold, Lutz G. & Russ, David, 2024. "Listening to the noise: On price efficiency with dynamic trading," International Review of Economics & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 93(PB), pages 103-120.
    8. Yu, Edison G., 2018. "Dynamic market participation and endogenous information aggregation," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 175(C), pages 491-517.
    9. Giovanni Cespa, 2005. "Giffen goods and market making," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 25(4), pages 983-997, June.
    10. Jan Schneemeier, 2019. "Shock Propagation Through Cross-Learning in Opaque Networks," 2019 Meeting Papers 329, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    11. Li, Frank Weikai & Sun, Chengzhu, 2022. "Information acquisition and expected returns: Evidence from EDGAR search traffic," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 141(C).
    12. Georgy Chabakauri & Kathy Yuan & Konstantinos E Zachariadis, 2022. "Multi-asset Noisy Rational Expectations Equilibrium with Contingent Claims," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 89(5), pages 2445-2490.
    13. Peress, Joel & Schmidt, Daniel, 2021. "Noise traders incarnate: Describing a realistic noise trading process," Journal of Financial Markets, Elsevier, vol. 54(C).
    14. He, Hua & Wang, Jiang, 1995. "Differential Information and Dynamic Behavior of Stock Trading Volume," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 8(4), pages 919-972.
    15. Paul Glasserman & Harry Mamaysky & Yiwen Shen, 2024. "Dynamic Information Regimes in Financial Markets," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 70(9), pages 6069-6092, September.
    16. Challe, Edouard & Chrétien, Edouard, 2015. "Market composition and price informativeness in a large market with endogenous order types," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 158(PB), pages 679-696.
    17. Giovanni Cespa & Xavier Vives, 2011. "Expectations, Liquidity, and Short-term Trading," CESifo Working Paper Series 3390, CESifo.
    18. Scott Robertson, 2023. "Equilibrium with Heterogeneous Information Flows," Papers 2304.01272, arXiv.org, revised Mar 2024.
    19. Iván Werning & George-Marios Angeletos, 2006. "Crises and Prices: Information Aggregation, Multiplicity, and Volatility," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 96(5), pages 1720-1736, December.
    20. Cujean, Julien & Andrei, Daniel & Fournier, Mathieu, 2019. "The Low-Minus-High Portfolio and the Factor Zoo," CEPR Discussion Papers 14153, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    EMBI; Argentina; Information Effect; Vaca Muerta; Natural Expriment;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • G1 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets
    • F3 - International Economics - - International Finance
    • E6 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Macroeconomic Policy, Macroeconomic Aspects of Public Finance, and General Outlook

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:aoz:wpaper:355. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Laura Inés D Amato (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/redniar.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.