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...

We create a newspaper-based Equity Market Volatility (EMV) tracker that moves with the VIX and with the realized volatility of returns on the S&P 500. Parsing the underlying text, we find that 72 percent of EMV articles discuss the Macroeconomic Outlook, and 44 percent discuss Commodity Markets....

The major bull and bear markets of this century have suggested to many that large decade-to-decade stock market swings reflect irrational "fads and fashions" that periodically sweep investors. We argue instead that investors have perceived significant shifts in the long-run mean rate of future...

This paper investigates why, in October 1987, almost all stock markets fell together despite widely differing economic circumstances. The idea is that "contagion" between markets occurs as the result of attempts by rational agents to infer information from price changes in other markets. This...

Studies find price increases for additions to the S&P 500 index but no decreases for deletions. Additions come with good earnings news, suggesting these studies are not just measuring an indexing effect. We develop a regression discontinuity design using Russell Indices for cleaner...

Brokers continue to play a critical role in intermediating institutional stock market transactions. More than half of all institutional investor order flow is still executed by high-touch (non-electronic) brokers. Despite the continued importance of brokers, we have limited information on what...

In the months prior to the stock market crash of 1929, the price of a seat on the New York Stock Exchange was abnormally low. Rising stock prices and volume should have driven up seat prices during the boom of 1929; instead there were negative cumulative abnormal returns to seats of approximately 20...

Morck, Yeung and Yu (MYY, 2000) show that R2 and other measures of stock market synchronicity are higher in countries with less developed financial systems and poorer corporate governance. MYY and Campbell, Lettau, Malkiel and Xu (2001) also find a secular decline in R2 in the United States over...

Heightened counterparty risk during the recent financial crisis has raised questions about the role clearinghouses play in global financial stability. Empirical identification of the effect of centralized clearing on counterparty risk is challenging because of the co-incidence of macro-economic...

This paper investigates the relation between returns on stock indices and their corresponding futures contracts in order to evaluate potential explanations for the pervasive yet anomalous evidence of positive, short-horizon portfolio autocorrelations. Using a simple theoretical framework, we...