We offer an explanation for the forward premium puzzle in foreign exchange markets based upon investor overconfidence. In the model, overconfident individuals overreact to their information about future inflation, which causes greater overshooting in the forward rate than in the spot rate. Thus,...

The portfolio flows of institutional investors are widely known to be persistent. What is less well known, however, is the source of this persistence. One possibility is the ?informed trading hypothesis?: that persistence arises from autocorrelated trades of investors who believe they have...

Standard models of informed speculation suggest that traders try to learn information that others do not have. This result implicitly relies on the assumption that speculators have long horizons, i.e, can hold the asset forever. By contrast, we show that if speculators have short horizons, they...

We offer a new social approach to investment decision making and asset prices. Investors discuss their strategies and convert others to their strategies with a probability that increases in investment returns. The conversion rate is shown to be convex in realized returns. Unconditionally, active...

This paper explores institutional investor trades in stocks grouped by style and the relationship of these trades with equity market returns. It aggregates transactions drawn from a large universe of approximately $6 trillion of institutional funds. To analyze style behavior, we assign equities...

We propose that innovative originality (InnOrig) is a valuable organizational resource, and that owing to limited investor attention and skepticism of complexity, firms with greater InnOrig are undervalued. We find that firms' InnOrig strongly predicts higher, more persistent, and less volatile...

Individuals and asset managers trade aggressively, resulting in high volume in asset markets, even when such trading results in high risk and low net returns. Asset prices display patterns of predictability that are difficult to reconcile with rational expectations-based theories of price...

We apply the method of constrained asset share estimation (CASE) to test the mean-variance efficiency (MVE) of the stock market. This method allows conditional expected returns to vary in relatively unrestricted ways. The data estimate reasonably the price of risk, and, in some cases, the MVE...

Ambiguity aversion alone does not explain the market nonparticipation puzzle. We show that in a rational expectations equilibrium model with a fund offering the risk-adjusted market portfolio (RAMP), ambiguity averse investors hold the fund and an information-based portfolio, and thus...