I introduce a novel proxy of investor sentiment and differences of opinion among trendchasing investors to forecast skewness in daily aggregate stock market returns. The new proxy is an easy-to-construct, real time measure available at different frequencies for more than a century. Empirically I...

This paper explores the opportunities of momentum and contrarian profits on the Bucharest Stock Exchange during quiet and turbulent times. In our investigation we employ daily values of the main indexes from the Bucharest Stock Exchange for two periods of time. During the first period, from...

In this paper we explore how the 2008 financial crisis impacted sell-side analysts' research as well as the market reactions to the publication of such research. Based on over 350,000 analyst reports from 2005 to 2010, we find that during the crisis analysts only disproportionately adapted their...

The information produced by sophisticated investors in the stock market may be useful for uninformed depositors. Since much information is not produced for Shinkin banks (cooperatives) in Japan, relying on the information from the stock market may be an efficient decision for these depositors....

Extant literature consistently documents that investors tilt their domestic equity portfolios towards regionally close stocks (local bias). We hypothesize that individual investors' local bias is not limited to the domestic sphere but instead also determines their international investment...

This paper investigates if familiarity induced by ambiguity aversion can help explaining the local bias phenomenon among individual investors. Using geographic closeness as a proxy for investor familiarity, we find that investors pull out of (unfamiliar) remote stocks, and pour into (familiar)...

The world is still facing a financial crisis that started in mid 2007 and up to moment it is unsolved. Stock markets around the world reacted badly and the real time news has never played such an important role to investors as seen in previous crises. The impact of the media deepened the bear...

Behavioural finance theories explain "why" individuals exhibit behaviours that do not maximize expected utility. Behavioural finance highlights inefficiencies, such as under- or over-reactions to information, as causes of market trends and, in extreme cases, of bubbles and crashes. Such...

The paper examines the implications arising from the effect of two cognitive biases, representativeness and conservatism, for securities price behaviour on the London Stock Exchange. In a single- and multi-factor framework of abnormal returns, the aspects of trend and consistency in the...

We examine the extent to which institutional investors herd in the U.S. corporate bond market and the price impact of their herding behavior. We find that the level of institutional herding in corporate bonds is substantially higher than what is documented for equities, and that sell herding is...