I use the global crisis of 1914 as a window onto the phenomenon of investor reaction to complex news — such as sudden political upheaval. Based on a novel database of all stocks traded on the NYSE during 1914, along with “real-time” news accounts from major newspapers, I show that NYSE...

In the follow-up to the 1926 financial crisis in France, a new government led by Raymond Poincaré attempted to restore monetary stability by restructuring public debt. This policy led to a sharp decrease in the outstanding amount of floating debt, which had become a standard source of funding...

This paper revisits what we know about the risk of stocks thanks to a non-US long term database. French stock market risk observed over the last 150 years, presents a long-term rise. Despite peace and economic stability, market risk has never converged to levels seen pre-1914. Reversely, the...

Using the Baker, Bloom, and Davis (2013) news-based measure to capture economic policy uncertainty (EPU) in the United States, we find that EPU positively forecasts log excess market returns. A one-standard deviation increase in EPU is associated with a 1.5% increase in forecasted 3-month...

We study the effect of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) on sell-side analysts' forecasts, and how it interact with the stock-market response to a firm's earnings news. We find that analysts tend to disagree more when faced with higher levels of EPU, and that their forecasts tend to be less...

This paper studies the role of generalized disappointment aversion (GDA) in reconciling several asset-pricing puzzles in models of long-run risks. To fully capture the nonlinearities introduced by these preferences, we solve the model globally with projection. This allows us to scrutinize the...

Investors who use biased information from news media subsequently tend to make irrational decisions about acquiring firm-specific information compared to rational expectations. This model of information acquisition yields testable predictions that are verified by using a novel dataset. First,...

Complex risks differ from simple risks in that agents facing them only possess imperfect information about the underlying objective probabilities. This paper studies how complex risks are priced by and shared among heterogeneous investors in a Walrasian market. I apply decision theory under...

Risk aversion theory is based on individuals' choice among risky assets with expected utility in its foundation. It is about investor behavior (i.e. investor choice), under normal circumstances, towards assets with various levels of risk. A positive and marginally diminishing relationship...

Why are stock prices much more volatile than the underlying dividends? The excess volatility of prices can in principle be attributed to two different causes: time-varying discount rates for expected future dividends, arising from variation in risk premia; or the irrational exuberance of...