Stock prices occasionally move in response to unverified rumors. I propose a cheap talk model in which a rumormonger's incentives to tell the truth depend on the interaction between her investment horizon and the information acquisition decisions of message-receiving investors. The model's key...

We investigate how short sellers strategically exploit the liquidity generated by the arrival of ambiguous information – i.e. information likely to cause disagreement in interpretation. Using a sample of newspaper articles, media newswires, and press releases, we construct a measure of...

The US Treasury effectively ”owns” about 24% of the stocks held by high income US taxable investors. Through the capital gains tax, Uncle Sam has an effective exposure of more than $1 trillion of equities. And this huge-but-silent investor might be about to get a lot bigger if capital gains...

We measure the information content of monthly analyst consensus forecasts for one-year-forward earnings per share (EPS) based on two well-established price discovery measures drawn from the area of market micro-structure research. Employing a 36-year sample of large US companies listed in the...

Tests of excessive volatility along the lines of Shiller (1981) and Leroy and Porter (1981) count among the most convincing pieces of evidence against the validity of the time-honored efficient market hypothesis. Recently, using Shiller s distinction between ex-ante rational (fundamental) price...

This study investigates whether firm opacity impacts the investment behaviors and outcomes of retail investors using the fintech brokerage Robinhood (i.e., “RH investors”). We theorize that higher firm opacity leads RH investors to make nonrational investment decisions. The testable...

The correlation of returns for various equity asset classes has been high. In addition, the range or "dispersion" of returns across asset classes - and across sectors within those asset classes - has been low. These factors have made it difficult for active managers to outperform. But dispersion...

In the late 1990s, the Japanese government initiated a number of reforms that resulted in lower transaction costs and made the Japanese equity market more attractive for foreign institutions. Following these changes, foreign institutional holdings more than doubled, providing an opportunity to...

Contrary to the theoretical principle that higher risk is compensated with higher expected return, the literature shows that low-risk stocks outperform high-risk stocks. Using a large-scale household dataset, we provide an explanation for this puzzling result that the anomalous negative...

Using a very large data set with more than 9,700 stocks listed on NYSE, AMEX and NASDAQ, we analyze overnight price jumps and report short-term investor overreaction to information shocks and document return reversal and predictability up to five days. For negative and positive overnight jumps,...