This paper studies behavioral responses to taxes in financial markets. It is motivated by recent puzzling empirical evidence of taxable municipal bond yields significantly exceeding the level expected relative to tax exempt bonds. A behavioral explanation is a tax aversion bias, the phenomenon...

Estimated expected returns are important for pension plans, as they influence many plan characteristics including required asset levels, annual contributions, and the extent of plan under- or over funding. Yet, there seems to be little prior literature on the factors influencing these estimated...

We find that a small set of financial columnists has a causal effect on short-term aggregate stock market prices. For some journalists ("bulls") the market reaction is consistently positive, whereas for others ("bears") it is negative. Because bulls and bears are rotated exogenously in our...

For forty years, the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) has encouraged U.S. banks to lend to lower-income neighborhoods. Regarding costs, to comply with CRA, banks substitute away from small-business lending to other income groups and face higher default rates on loans made. Regarding benefits, in...

This study provides evidence of the significant impacts of unemployment indicators, including the projected unemployment rate and actual unemployment gap, on the cross-sectional stock returns in the Australian market. Utilising the extensive dataset of all listed stocks and unemployment data...

This paper provides evidence to the importance of revisions in expected unemployment rate in the cross-sectional pricing of individual stocks. We introduce a measure of unemployment beta which quantifies monthly-varying stock sensitivity to the innovations in forecasted unemployment rate. Stocks...