We reveal a novel channel through which market participants' sentiment influences how they forecast stock returns: their optimism (pessimism) affects the weights they assign to fundamentals. Our analysis yields four main findings. First, if good (bad) “news” about dividends and interest...

Predicted stock issuers (PSIs) are firms with expected “high-investment and low-profit” (HILP) profiles that earn unusually low returns. We carefully document important features of PSI firms to provide insights on the economic mechanism behind the HILP phenomenon. Top-PSI firms are...

This paper provides evidence that the market does not efficiently incorporate expected returns implied by analyst price targets into prices. I use a novel decomposition to extract information and bias components from these analyst-expected returns and develop an asset pricing framework that...

I dissect stock returns after earnings announcements into their overnight and intraday components and document strong positive abnormal overnight returns for several weeks after both large positive and negative earnings surprises. This finding is in line with attention-induced buying pressure....

Research shows that stocks with fluent names trade at higher prices. However, it is not clear whether fluency simply appeals to naive investors, or actually identifies better firms. In this paper, we disentangle these two explanations. Consistent with our theoretical model, we find that the...

I show that endogenous investor inattention – investors allocating cognitive resources based on incentives – can explain substantial price underreaction to public information in corporate bond and stock markets. The key evidence is that prices under- react less to more payoff-relevant risks....

Consensus analyst target prices are widely available online at no cost to investors. In this paper we consider whether these consensus target prices are informative for predicting future returns. We find that when considered in isolation, consensus target prices are not generally informative...

We document a nominal stock price effect that is (like momentum) associated with (national) culture. Using the full spectrum of cultural dimensions proposed by Hofstede et al. and the cross-section of stock returns of 41 countries, we not only show a robust predictive and explanatory power of...

Risk aversion theory is based on individuals' choice among risky assets with expected utility in its foundation. It is about investor behavior (i.e. investor choice), under normal circumstances, towards assets with various levels of risk. A positive and marginally diminishing relationship...

High idiosyncratic volatility (IV) stocks follow predictable return pattern after exhibiting large ex ante returns: a period of underreaction and low returns is superseded by persistent high returns. This pattern is robust and economically significant: it may be interpreted as informationally...