We develop a framework to theoretically and empirically analyze the fluctuations of the aggregate stock market. Households allocate capital to institutions, which are fairly constrained, for example operating with a mandate to maintain a fixed equity share or with moderate scope for variation in...

We study theoretically and empirically the relationship between investor beliefs, ownership dispersion and stock returns. We find that high dispersion, measured by high breadth or low Herfindahl index, forecasts returns positively for large stocks, as in Chen, Hong and Stein (2002), but...

We build a cross-sectional factor model for investors' direct stock holdings, by analogy with standard time-series factor models for stock returns. We estimate the model using data from almost 10 million retail accounts in the Indian stock market. We find that stock characteristics such as firm...

We examine several measures of uncertainty to make five points. First, equity market traders and executives at nonfinancial firms have shared similar assessments about one-year-ahead uncertainty since the pandemic struck. Both the one-year VIX and our survey-based measure of firm-level...

We find that among stocks dominated by retail investors, the lottery anomaly is amplified by high investor attention (proxied by high analyst coverage, salient earnings surprises, or recency of extreme positive returns) and intense social interactions (proxied by Facebook social connectedness or...

The rise of Target Date Funds (TDFs) has moved a significant share of retail investors into contrarian trading strategies that rebalance between stocks and bonds so as to maintain age-appropriate portfolio shares. We show that i) TDFs actively rebalance within a few months following differential...

We study the impact of the 1918 Spanish Flu on U.S. stock prices. We use the death rate to control for the impact of the global pandemic and war news reported in the New York Times to capture the positive effects of the end of World War I on stock prices. Using a new weekly hand collected NYSE...