Psychological evidence and casual intuition predict that sunny weather is associated with upbeat mood. This paper examines the relationship between morning sunshine in the city of a country's leading stock exchange and daily market index returns across 26 countries from 1982 to 1997. Sunshine is...

In existing models of information acquisition, all informed investors receive their information at the same time. This article analyzes trading behavior and equilibrium information acquisition when some investors receive common private information before others. The model implies that, under...

This paper uses pre-offer market valuations to evaluate the misvaluation and "Q" theories of takeovers. Bidder and target valuations (price-to-book, or price-to-residual-income-model-value) are related to means of payment, mode of acquisition, premia, target hostility, offer success, and bidder...

Recent studies propose that limited investor attention causes market underreactions. This paper directly tests this explanation by measuring the information load faced by investors. The "investor distraction hypothesis" holds that extraneous news inhibits market reactions to relevant news. We...

The basic paradigm of asset pricing is in vibrant flux. The purely rational approach is being subsumed by a broader approach based upon the psychology of investors. In this approach, security expected returns are determined by both "risk" and "misvaluation". This survey sketches a framework for...

We propose a theory of securities market under- and overreactions based on two well-known psychological biases: investor overconfidence about the precision of private information; and biased self-attribution, which causes asymmetric shifts in investors' confidence as a function of their...