It is generally believed that excessive stock market volatility reflects non-mathematical market expectations that are driven by “irrational exuberance” or “animal spirits”. As shown in this paper, there is an alternative explanation. If ex-ante and ex-post expectations are calculated in...

We survey clients of a German online bank to study retail investors' beliefs about the autocorrelation of annual returns of the aggregate stock market, and the role of these beliefs in financial decisions. A majority of our respondents believe in mean reversion of aggregate returns, and these...

Investors' return expectations are pivotal in stock markets, but the reasoning behind these expectations remains a black box for economists. This paper sheds light on economic agents' mental models - their subjective understanding - of the stock market, drawing on surveys with the US general...

Investors' return expectations are pivotal in stock markets, but the reasoning behind these expectations remains a black box for economists. This paper sheds light on economic agents' mental models - their subjective understanding - of the stock market, drawing on surveys with the US general...

We develop a dynamic model of belief dispersion with a continuum of investors differing in beliefs. The model is tractable and qualitatively matches many of the empirical regularities in a stock price, its mean return, volatility, and trading volume. We find that the stock price is convex in...

We develop a dynamic model of belief dispersion with a continuum of investors differing in beliefs. The model is tractable and qualitatively matches many of the empirical regularities in a stock price, its mean return, volatility, and trading volume. We find that the stock price is convex in...

We use a Panel Smooth Transition Regression (STR) model to study nonlinearities in the expectation-formation process in the U.S. stock market. To this end, we use data from the Livingston survey to investigate how the importance of regressive and extrapolative expectations fluctuates over time...