The roots of the 2008 financial crisis are often traced back to the collapse of the housing bubble. The factors that precipitated the crisis, and propagated its effects on firms and consumers to produce an economic contraction, are still the subject of ongoing debate among academics, policy...

This dissertation addresses issues concerning liquidity and its volatility. It consists of two essays. The first essay, "Liquidity, Macro Factors and the U.S. Equity Flows to Emerging Markets", examines the role of liquidity on equity flows from the U.S. to fifteen emerging markets around the...

This paper examines pricing in the market for depositary receipts, securities designed to track the performance of a stock index that trade like shares of stock. Arbitrage costs are low because these assets have low fundamental risk, low transactions costs, and high dividend yields. We find that...

The most important factor that affects the decision making process in finance is the risk which is usually measured by variance (total risk) or systematic risk (beta). Since investors' sentiment (whether she is an optimist or pessimist) plays a very important role in the choice of beta measure,...

This paper reconsiders the effect of investor sentiment on stock prices. Using survey-based sentiment indicators from Germany and the US we confirm previous findings of predictability at intermediate time horizons. The main contribution of our paper is that we also analyze the immediate price...

We study the relationship between the risk preferences of individuals and the risk preferences of the aggregate economy. To emphasize the vast differences that can occur between individual and market preferences brought about through aggregation, we assume an economy consisting entirely of risk...

This paper shows that an important link between investor sentiment and firm overvaluation is optimistic earnings expectations, and that management earnings guidance helps resolve sentiment-driven overvaluation. Using previously identified firm characteristics, we find that most of the negative...

In this paper, we investigate whether the international version of CAPM can price rational and irrational sentiments of U.S. individual and institutional investor sentiments. The results show that the CAPM prices rational sentiments driven by fundamentals and irrational sentiments not driven by...

One of the main arguments of behavioral finance is that some properties of asset prices are most probably regarded as deviations from fundamental value and they are generated by the participation of traders who are not fully rational, thus called noise traders. Noise trader theory postulates...

This paper presents a case study of a well-informed investor in the South Sea bubble. We argue that Hoare's Bank, a fledgling West End London banker, knew that a bubble was in progress and that it invested knowingly in the bubble; it was profitable to "ride the bubble." Using a unique dataset on...