Over the past two decades, respondents to the Shiller Investor Confidence Surveys assess the probability of a catastrophic stock market crash to be much higher that the historical frequency of such events. We decompose these crash probabilities into fundamental and subjective components and use...

The financial press is a conduit for popular narratives that reflect collective memory about historical events. Some collective memories relate to major stock market crashes, and investors may rely on associated narratives, or "crash narratives," to inform current beliefs and choices. Using...

We study the effects of broadband internet use on the investment decisions of individual investors. A public program in Norway provides plausibly exogenous variation in internet use. Our instrumental variables estimates show that internet use causes a substantial increase in stock market...

Using a semi-supervised topic model on 7,000,000 New York Times articles spanning 160 years, we test whether topics of media discourse predict future stock and bond market returns to test rational and behavioral hypotheses about market valuation of disaster risk. Focusing on media discourse...

We decompose the difference between a firm's market value and book value into two components: reproducible intangible assets that can be created by competing firms through SG&A/R&D expenditures, and the residual denoted as franchise value which includes the value of transient-rents from...

We propose a unified theory of asset price determination encompassing both "conventional" and "alternative" asset classes (private equity, real estate, etc.). The model features disruption of old by young firms and skewness in the distribution of innovative rents among the young innovators. The...

Stock markets play a dual role: help allocate capital by conveying information about firms' fundamentals and provide liquidity by quickly turning stocks into cash. We propose a trading model in which these two roles are endogenously related: more intensive use of stocks for liquidity affects...

We build a model of the law of small numbers (LSN)--the incorrect belief that even small samples represent the properties of the underlying population--to study its implications for trading behavior and asset prices. In our model, a belief in the LSN induces investors to expect short-term price...

Average idiosyncratic volatility and firm idiosyncratic volatility increase with the number of listed firms. Average industry idiosyncratic volatility increases with the number of listed firms in the industry. We ex-plain the relation between idiosyncratic volatility and the number of listed...

We document that value-to-price, the ratio of Residual-Income-Model-based valuation to market price, subsumes the power of book-to-market ratio and many other value or quality measures in predicting stock returns. Long-short value-to-price portfolios hedge against momentum, revitalize the...