Investors allocate attention between competing activities and signals. Existing theories suggest that macro-news announcements crowd out attention to firm-level news, causing greater market underreaction to firm-level earnings announcements. We find the opposite: the sensitivity of announcement...

Psychological evidence indicates that it is hard to process multiple stimuli and perform multiple tasks at the same time. This paper tests the investor distraction hypothesis, which holds that the arrival of extraneous news causes trading and market prices to react sluggishly to relevant news...

Using social network data from Facebook, we show that earnings announcements made by firms located in counties with higher investor social network centrality attract more attention from both retail and institutional investors. For such firms, the immediate price and volume reactions to earnings...

This study tests whether naïve trading by individual investors, or some class of individual investors, causes post-earnings announcement drift (PEAD). Inconsistent with the individual trading hypothesis, individual investor trading fails to subsume any of the power of extreme earnings surprises...

We model limited attention as incomplete usage of publicly available information. Informed players decide whether or not to disclose to observers who sometimes neglect either disclosed signals or the implications of non-disclosure. In equilibrium observers are unrealistically optimistic,...