For mergers and acquisitions with a small failure probability, the average decline in target stock price if the deal fails is much larger than the average increase that accompanies deal success. Probability weighting implies that the deal failure probability of such target stocks will be...

I review the empirical literature on word of mouth (WOM) among investors. I begin with an outline of the empirical challenges that WOM research faces and possible strategies to overcome those challenges. I then discuss recent studies on WOM among retail and institutional investors. The research...

This paper examines to what extent stock market anomalies are driven by firm fundamentals in an investment-based asset pricing framework. Using Bayesian Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), we estimate a two-capital q-model to match firm-level stock returns, instead of matching portfolio-level...

The purpose of this paper is to make a quantitative and qualitative critical analyse regarding the three important aspects of stock market evolution. First, the forecasting problems are presented and analyse in order to establish the main problems and the potential solutions. Second, the...

Two ex-ante variables are introduced to characterize the analysts’ biased behavior, namely the analysts’ disagreement and self-selection in analysts’ coverage. The study investigates the impact of the analysts’ disagreement and self-selection on the stock returns. A theoretical analysis...

Certain corporate transactions (eg. insider purchases and buyback announcements) are known to be robust predictors of firm-level returns. However, I empirically show equity analysts largely ignore such informative, yet subtle, signals of stocks they cover. A trading strategy that follows...

We provide the first large-scale study of the performance of expected-return proxies (ERPs) internationally. Analyst-forecast-based ICCs are sparsely populated and not robustly associated with future returns. Earnings-model-forecast-based ICCs are well-populated, but are unreliable outside the...

This paper studies the excess returns on stocks, associated to various company fundamentals on a panel of US stocks from 1979 to 2008. The returns premia are measured using a random coefficient panel data model on the individual stock level. We show that the HML and SMB factors in the Fama and...

This paper investigates the asset pricing implications of the strategic incentives of analysts. I find that deviations between consensus analyst optimism across forecasts and recommendations for the same firm lead to temporary price movements. For example, among firms with differences between...

The same firm characteristics that help explain cross-sectional variation in expected stock returns, such as size, book-to-market and the earnings yield, also help explain cross-sectional variation in returns to trading in option-implied stock return volatility. This empirical phenomenon is...