We show that immediate and delayed abnormal returns following earnings announcement surprises differ across market states. Immediate abnormal returns are more sensitive to earnings surprises in down markets, while delayed abnormal returns are less sensitive; underreaction is attenuated in down...

Investing in financial securities inevitably involves risks on the one hand and opportunities on the other hand. This thesis bundles four different studies on risks and/or opportunities in financial markets. In one study, we examine the cross-sectional explanatory power of different...

Within this paper, we analyze the impact of Financial Times Deutschland (FTD) news on stock prices and trading volumes. Based on a sample of all news on German DAX, MDAX and SDAX companies published within the news section of the FTD between 2006 and 2010, our results show that articles that...

In this paper we address three main objections of behavioral finance to the theory of rational finance, considered as “anomalies” the theory of rational finance cannot explain: (i) Predictability of asset returns; (ii) The Equity Premium; (iii) The Volatility Puzzle. We offer resolutions of...

In this paper, we examine the economic value of a text-based measure of financial integration. Our attention measure of financial integration is a strong positive predictor of currency excess returns. Specifically, the financial integration measure is positively priced in the cross-section of...

We measure investors' short- and long-term stock-return expectations using both options and survey data. These expectations at different horizons reveal what investors think their own short-term expectations will be in the future, or forward return expectations. While contemporaneous short-term...

Feedback from stock prices to cash flows occurs because information revealed by firms' stock prices influences the actions of competitors. We explore the implications of feedback within a noisy rational expectations setting with publicly listed and private firms. In our setting, stock prices are...

It is generally accepted that excessive exuberance or gloom in investor sentiment contributes to booms and crashes in asset prices but, because of its complex interaction with other aspects of the valuation process, these effects are not easy to identify with statistical confidence and this...

A popular interpretation of the Rational Expectations/Efficient Markets hypothesis states that, if the hypothesis holds, then market valuations must follow a random walk. This postulate has frequently been criticized on the basis of empirical evidence. Yet the assertion itself incurs what we...

We find that procyclical stocks, whose returns comove with business cycles, earn higher average returns than countercyclical stocks. We use almost a three-quarter century of real GDP growth expectations from economists' surveys to determine forecasted economic states. This approach largely...