We examine the stock market returns in an environment in which the dates of the central bank’s information supply through public announcements are not prescheduled. We document that positive excess returns are accumulated as early as three days before China’s central bank releases the monthly data of monetary aggregates, which may be announced either early or late in a month. In particular, this pre-announcement premium exists only when an announcement arrives late in an announcement cycle. We provide a theoretical framework in which the degree of information acquisition in the market increases as the date approaches the end of an announcement cycle while investors are still waiting for the arrival of an announcement, a hypothesis that receives strong empirical support. We show that the information acquisition channel highlighted in Ai, Bansal, and Han (2022) explains the uncertainty reduction and the positive risk premium before monetary announcements in China.

We examine how strategic buyer behavior affects equilibrium outcomes in a model of dynamic price competition where sellers benefit from learning-by-doing by allowing each buyer to expect to capture a share of future buyer surplus. Many equilibria that exist when buyers consider only their immediate payoffs are eliminated when buyers expect to capture even a modest share of future surplus, and the equilibria that survive are those where long-run market competition is more likely to be preserved. Our results are relevant for antitrust policy and our approach may be useful for future analyses of dynamic competition. (JEL C73, D21, D43, D83, K21, L13, L40)

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