We present evidence of investors underreacting to the absence of events in financial markets. Routine-based insiders strategically choose to be silent when they possess private information not yet reflected in stock prices. Consistent with our hypothesis, insider silence following routine sell...

This paper examines the relation between firm-level implied volatility skew and the likelihood of extreme negative events, or crash risk. I show that volatility skew identifies which firms are likely to experience crashes, but only in short-window earnings announcement periods. The predictive...

We find that an increase in the ``unusualness'' of news with negative sentiment predicts an increase in stock market volatility. Similarly, unusual positive news forecasts lower volatility. Our analysis is based on more than 360,000 articles on 50 large financial companies, published in...