Portfolio optimization focuses on risk and return prediction, yet implementation costs critically matter. Predicting trading costs is challenging because costs depend on trade size and trader identity, thus impeding a generic solution. We focus on a component of trading costs that applies...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Browser data from an approximately representative sample of individual investors offers a detailed account of their search for information, including how much time they spend on stock research, which stocks they research, what categories of information they seek, and when they gather information...

Using a large and representative panel of U.S. brokerage accounts, we show that retail investors trade as contrarians after large earnings surprises, especially for loser stocks, and that such contrarian trading contributes to price momentum and post earnings announcement drift (PEAD). We show...

We propose a new methodology to build portfolios that hedge the economic and financial risks from climate change. Our quantity-based approach exploits information on how mutual fund managers trade in response to idiosyncratic changes in their climate risk beliefs. We exploit two types of...

Investors' behavior in U.S. Treasuries - the world's safe asset - affects monetary policy transmission mechanisms, fiscal policy space, loan pricing, and international vulnerabilities. Yet it is not well understood for a simple reason: researchers, not having a clear picture of the Treasury...