Does the ability to protect an asset from unsecured creditors affect its price? This paper identifies the impact of bankruptcy protection on house prices using 139 changes in homestead exemptions. Large increases in the homestead exemption raised house prices 3% before 2005. Smaller exemption...

Equity markets fail to account for value-relevant non-public information enjoyed by syndicated loan participants and reflected in publicly-posted loan prices. A long-short strategy that buys (sells) the equities of firms whose loans have recently appreciated (depreciated) earns large...

We test the hypothesis that retail investors' attraction to lottery stocks induces overvaluation, and is amplified by high attention and social interactions. The lottery premium (negative abnormal returns) is stronger for high-retail-ownership stocks—especially those that also have high...

We quantify disagreement about the economy with ex-ante measures of divergence of opinion among economic forecasters and investigate if economic disagreement has a significant impact on the cross-sectional pricing of individual stocks. We find a significant disagreement premium of 7.2% per...

We investigate the role of economic uncertainty in the cross-sectional pricing of individual stocks and equity portfolios. We estimate stock exposure to an economic uncertainty index and show that stocks in the lowest uncertainty beta decile generate 6% more annualized risk-adjusted return...

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...

We document the predictive ability and economic significance of global economic policy uncertainty for U.S. equity returns. After orthogonalizing global economic policy uncertainty (global EPU) with respect to the U.S. EPU, we find that it has significant predictive power for aggregate stock...

In this paper, we construct a sample of news co-occurrences using big data technologies. We show that stocks that co-occur in news articles are less risky, bigger, and more covered by financial analysts, and economically-connected stocks are mentioned more often in the same news articles. We...