Over the last decades passive investment products have continuously increased in importance. The efficiency of financial markets is often identified as the main reason for this development. We propose a theoretical framework which reverses the causality by showing that market efficiency might...

This paper examines unique cultural features associated with the Japanese calendar known as rokuyo, which classifies days into six categories of varying levels of favorable/unfavorable sentiment days. Prior to the internationalization of Japanese financial markets in the early 1980s, rokuyo has...

We show in a simple framework that momentum trading can exist in equilibrium and momentum trading is profitable. Properties of the model fit the empirics well. First, the model captures in a parsimonious manner both short-term overreaction and long-term reversals. Second, it predicts that...

We document a robust positive relationship between the belief dispersion about macroeconomic conditions among household investors and the stock market trading volume, using more than 30 years of household survey data and a novel approach to measuring belief dispersions. Notably, such a...

Strategies that overweight low beta stocks and underweight high beta stocks earn positive alphas. Price noise is known to affect high beta stocks, hence, noise trading can be expected to significantly affect the performance of these strategies. I study the impact of flows between bond and equity...

We examine whether consumer confidence - as a proxy for individual investor sentiment - affects expected stock returns internationally in 18 industrialized countries. In line with recent evidence for the U.S., we find that sentiment negatively forecasts aggregate stock market returns on average...