We show that U.S. analysts alter their behavior in response to a randomly assigned shock that exogenously varies the timeliness and cost of accessing companies' mandatory disclosures in the cross-section of investors: analysts reduce the number of stocks they cover, issue less optimistic and...

Firms often issue disaggregated earnings forecasts, and prior research reveals benefits to doing so. However, we hypothesize and experimentally find that the benefits of disaggregated forecasts do not necessarily carry over to the time of actual earnings announcements. Rather, disaggregated...

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the predictability of earnings information before the quarterly disclosure date. Two categories of firms are contrasted: the firms that announce better quarterly earnings than the prior period and the firms that do not. The paper uses a sample of 67...

The Baker and Wurgler (2006) sentiment index purports to measure irrational investor sentiment, while the University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index is designed to largely reflect fundamentals. Removing this fundamental component from the Baker and Wurgler index creates an index of investor...

The 52-week high share price has been shown by George and Hwang (2004) to carry significant predictive ability for individual stock returns, dominating other common momentum-based trading strategies. This study examines the performance of trading strategies for mutual funds based on (1) an...

We examine the predictive effect of sentiment on the cross-section of stock returns across different economic states. The degree of mispricing and the subsequent price correction can be different between economic expansion and recession because of the limits of arbitrage and short sale...

In contrast to previous studies, we redefine the category of "rationality" from the perspective of investors' pursuit for wealth maximization. Using the data from Chinese stock market, this paper studies the impact of rational and irrational sentiment on asset returns from short-term to...

Individuals and asset managers trade aggressively, resulting in high volume in asset markets, even when such trading results in high risk and low net returns. Asset prices display patterns of predictability that are difficult to reconcile with rational expectations – based theories of price...

We investigate the dynamic problem of how much attention an investor should pay to news in order to learn about stock-return predictability and maximize expected lifetime utility. We show that the optimal amount of attention is U-shaped in the return predictor, increasing with both uncertainty...

This paper challenges the prevailing view that investor sentiment is a contrarian predictor of market returns at nearly all horizons. As an important piece of "out-of-sample" evidence, we document that investor sentiment in China is a reliable momentum signal at monthly frequency. The strong...