We assess the impact of media sentiment on international equity prices using more than 4.5 million Reuters articles published across the globe between 1991 and 2015. News sentiment robustly predicts daily returns in both advanced and emerging markets, even after controlling for known...

Policymakers often express concern that herding by financial market participants destabilizes markets and increases the fragility of the financial system. This paper provides an overview of the recent theoretical and empirical research on herd behavior in financial markets. It addresses the...

We study a model where investment decisions are based on investors’ information about the unknown and endogenous return of the investment. The information of investors consists of endogenously determined messages sold by financial analysts who have access to both public and private information...

We provide a comprehensive empirical characterization of the linkages between key macroeconomic and financial variables around business and financial cycles for 21 OECD countries over the period 1960–2007. In particular, we analyze the implications of 122 recessions, 112 (28) credit...

This paper examines the performance of emerging market bank stocks around the time of rating changes by major international agencies. The data suggest that downgrades on average have followed periods of negative cumulative abnormal returns for banks, although upgrades have not followed periods...

The terrorist attacks that have occurred in the past few years around the world have raised international awareness of the danger of terrorism and its complex repercussions on the financial markets. This paper explores the ways in which financial markets reacted to the attacks and the...

Volatility in financial markets has forced economists to reexamine the validity of the efficient markets hypothesis, and new empirical approaches have been applied to the study of this important issue in recent years. Many of the recent studies have found evidence of excessive volatility. In the...

This paper provides an overview of indicators that can be used to illustrate and analyze liquidity developments in financial markets. The measures include bid-ask spreads, turnover ratios, and price impact measures. They gauge different aspects of market liquidity, namely tightness (costs),...