This work aims to initiate a reflection on the awareness of environmental, social, and corporate governance issues, summarized in the acronym ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance), among Italian SMEs. The integration of ESG issues into business models has led to an expansion of the risk...

This study examines the association between the culturally endorsed charismatic leadership style in a society and stock price crash risk. The results reveal a positive and statistically significant association, providing support to the arguments about the dark-side view of charismatic...

We combine machine learning algorithms (ML) with textual analysis techniques to forecast bank stock returns. Our textual features are derived from press releases of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). We show that ML models produce more accurate out-of-sample predictions than OLS...

This study sheds new light on the question of whether or not sentiment surveys, and the expectations derived from them, are relevant to forecasting economic growth and stock returns, and whether they contain information that is orthogonal to macroeconomic and financial data. I examine 16...

The theory of fair geometric returns, F theory for short, rejects the generally accepted notion that volatility is the risk of risky assets. Instead, it claims that capital market volatility, in turn, constitutes the maximum achievable geometric return. In order to get to the point, F theory, in...

The implicit assumption of linearity is an important element in empirical finance. This study presents a hypothesis testing approach which examines the linear behaviour of the conditional mean between stock and bond returns. Conventional tests detect spurious non-linearity in the conditional...

Return chasing is often cited as one of the primary behavioral foibles of investors, resulting in sub-par returns. Surprisingly, the literature does not provide a generally accepted and testable description of return chasing. This paper proposes a simple definition. It then describes how return...

One of the key assumptions in financial markets analysis is that of normally distributed returns and market efficiency. Both of these assumptions have been extensively challenged in the literature. In the present paper, we examine returns for a number of FTSE 100 and AIM stocks and indices based...

The concept of a market portfolio plays an important role in many financial theories and models. Knowledge of each asset's share of the invested capital markets is both useful information and a good starting point for investors considering the appropriate allocation to the asset. In our latest...

Using proprietary data on millions of trades by retail investors, we provide the first large-scale evidence that retail short selling predicts negative stock returns. A portfolio that mimics weekly retail shorting earns an annualized risk-adjusted return of 9%. The predictive ability of retail...