We use weekly survey data on short-term and medium-term sentiment of German investors in order to study the causal relationship between investors' mood and subsequent stock price changes. In contrast to extant literature for other countries, a tri-variate vector autoregression for short-run...

The efficient market hypothesis describes an efficient market as one in which investors cannot consistently predict stock returns because prices instantly reflect all the information flowing into the market. However, return predictability has been documented in many markets. This study tests the...

We investigate the prediction of excess returns and fundamentals by financial ratios – dividend-price ratio, earnings-price ratio, and book-to-market ratio – by decomposing financial ratios into a cyclical component and a stochastic trend component. We find both components predict excess...

We define a sentiment indicator based on option prices, valuation ratios and interest rates. The indicator can be interpreted as a lower bound on the expected growth in fundamentals that a rational investor would have to perceive in order to be happy to hold the market. The lower bound was...

Using 719,830 analyst recommendations from 1994 to 2017, we construct various portfolios based on levels and changes in analyst recommendations and examine how the value of those recommendations in predicting the abnormal stock returns has changed over time. We find that the predictive value of...

The performance of analysts’ forecasts has attracted increasing attention in recent years. However, as yet, no empirical study has investigated the nexus between the analyst forecast dispersion (AFD) and excess returns surrounding stock market crashes in any depth. This paper attempts to fill...

We show empirically that survey-based measures of expected inflation are significant and strong predictors of future aggregate stock returns in several industrialized countries both in-sample and out-of-sample. By empirically discriminating between competing sources of this return predictability...

In the paper, we show a significant economic linkage between analyst EPS forecast skewness and cross section stock returns. The effect on stock return of our skewness measure is quite different from that based on skewness calculated from options or high frequency data. Literature shows that,...

According to present-value models, a financial valuation ratio should predict future stock returns or cash flows but empirically shows little power. This paper develops insights about stock return predictability and reconciles the contradicting findings. We decompose a financial ratio into (1) a...

Using a unique survey dataset, I study how financial market experts form their stock market expectations. I document a strong disagreement among experts about how important macroeconomic and financial variables are related to stock returns. The results of an analysis of the relationships between...