In a world of increasingly extensive information, rational investors can make better decisions. However, reinforcement-oriented investors are also more likely to observe preferred signals close to their own perception. A focus on these signals distorts the perceived aggregate signal in the...

In this paper, we disentangle investor sentiment into two components: mood and household attitudes towards the economy. We apply acoustical analysis to the daily top ten of music downloads in iTunes for Germany to derive a novel and direct measure for mood. We match this novel mood index with...

I exploit a natural experiment to show that household investment decisions depend on the manner in which information is displayed. Israeli retirement funds were prohibited from displaying returns for periods shorter than twelve months. In this setting, the information displayed was altered but...

This paper examines the relationship between investor sentiment and UK stock returns at economy and industry level. Using consumer and business confidence indicators provided by the European Commission, we provide novel evidence on whether sector-specific sentiment differs from the aggregate...

The disposition effect describes the tendency of investors to sell assets that have increased in value since purchase, and hold those that have not. We analyse the introduction of betting market `Cash-Outs', which provide a continual update - and therefore increase the salience - of bettors'...

We use high frequency consumer perception data to conduct the first event study of consumers’ perceptual responses to earnings announcements. We find that consumers’ attention to brands is heightened around earnings announcements. Moreover, we document that the change in consumers’ overall...

The assumption that mood affects investors' behavior in the field is gaining acceptance due to experimental studies and papers linking stock returns with environmental variables, such as weather and length of day. To identify mood effects this paper utilizes account level stock trading data from...

We introduce a novel method for training computer algorithms to measure news sentiment. Our approach leverages human-coded sentiment scores from over 200,000 newspaper articles to teach the computer to select words, word combinations, and their linear weights. In an out-of-sample test, examining...

This paper examines customer momentum, defined as a positive relationship between a firm's returns and past returns of its customers. I confirm previous evidence (Cohen and Frazzini 2008) that customer momentum is both statistically and economically significant. Long-short equally-weighted...