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...

This study presents evidence suggesting that investors do not fully unravel predictable pessimism in sell-side analysts' earnings forecasts. We show that measures of prior consensus and individual analyst forecast pessimism are predictive of both the sign of firms' earnings surprises and the...

Final working paper version. "" Published version: The Review of Financial Studies, Volume 31, Issue 7, July 2018, pp. 2499–2552. Past fund performance does a poor job of predicting future outcomes. The reason is noise. Using a random effects framework, we reduce the noise by pooling...

This article shows that aggregate analyst recommendations predict future aggregate excess returns at MSA and state level (i.e. local level). The results hold even after controlling for macroeconomic variables, industry and market returns, as well as investor sentiment. We also show that the...

This research applies findings from the field of factor investing to address the question of what drives private equity deal returns. I provide empirical evidence that the most comprehensively documented factor anomalies have explanatory power of cross sectional variations in returns of private...

This study focuses on the impact of model estimation methods on earnings forecast accuracy. Compared with an ordinary least squares (OLS) regression combined with winsorization, robust regression MM-estimation improves the earnings forecast accuracy of all the models examined, especially for...

The role of public sentiment in stock market volatility has recently become increasingly relevant. Twitter, in theory, offers an inexpensive way to measure real-time public sentiment. We take advantage of a natural experiment to assess the potential improvement that social media adds to forecast...

We document significant persistence in the market timing performance of active individual investors, suggesting that some investors are skilled at timing. Using data on all trades by active Finnish individual investors over almost 15 years, we also show that the net purchases of skilled versus...

We propose that innovative originality is a valuable organizational resource, and that owing to limited investor attention and skepticism of complexity, greater innovative originality may be undervalued. We find that firms' innovative originality strongly predicts higher, more persistent, and...

This study presents direct evidence on the question whether investors recognize the widely documented biases in securities analysts' earnings forecasts. The internal rate of return implied by current stock price and consensus earnings forecasts is found to be correlated with indicators of bias...