Different share classes on the same firms provide a natural experiment to explore how investor clienteles affect momentum and short-term reversals. Domestic retail investors have a greater presence in Chinese A shares, and foreign institutions are relatively more prevalent in B shares. These...

Real investors and markets are too complicated to be neatly summarized by a few selected biases and trading frictions. The "top down" approach to behavioral finance focuses on the measurement of reduced form, aggregate sentiment and traces its effects to stock returns. It builds on the two...

We explore the consequences for corporate financial policy that arise when investors exhibit inertial behavior. One implication of investor inertia is that, all else equal, a firm pursuing a strategy of equity-financed growth will prefer a stock-for-stock merger to greenfield investment financed...

We test whether fund managers have stock-picking skill by comparing their holdings and trades prior to earnings announcements with the returns realized at those events. This approach largely avoids the joint-hypothesis problem with long-horizon studies of fund performance. Consistent with...

We examine how investor sentiment affects the cross-section of stock returns. Theory predicts that a broad wave of sentiment will disproportionately affect stocks whose valuations are highly subjective and are difficult to arbitrage. We test this prediction by studying how the cross-section of...

We develop a theory in which the decision to pay dividends is driven by investor demand. Managers cater to investors by paying dividends when investors put a stock price premium on payers and not paying when investors prefer nonpayers. To test this prediction, we construct four time series...

We build a model that helps explain why increases in liquidity - such as lower bid-ask spreads, a lower price impact of trade, or higher share turnover - predict lower subsequent returns in both firm-level and aggregate data. The model features a class of irrational investors, who underreact to...