These days it's become convention (reinforced by the media's treatment of wealth) to assess our net worth by tallying up the market value of our financial assets, even though it's more natural and useful to think of our wealth as a stream of dollars over time given the nature of our income and...

Countercyclical dispersion of firm outcomes (micro dispersion) is commonly used as a proxy for micro uncertainty. In this paper, we characterize conditions under which micro dispersion and micro uncertainty co-move positively in the context of a large Cournot economy with dispersed information...

We show theoretically that when Bayesian investors face time-series uncertainty about assets' risk exposures, differences in their priors affect the pricing of risk in the cross-section: different priors for the same asset can generate differences in perceived risk exposures, and thereby...

Quarterly earnings conference calls convey fundamental information, as well as manager and analyst opinion about the firm. We examine how market uncertainty regarding firm valuation is affected by conference call tones. Using textual analysis of all publicly available earnings calls (2002-2012)...

We use clickstream data to show that investors' demand for information about macroeconomic factors affecting the path of future interest rates is a measure of their uncertainty about this path. In particular, an increase in information demand ahead of influential economic announcements affecting...

We study an economy with incomplete information in which two agents are uncertain and disagree about the length of business cycles. That is, the agents do not question whether the economy is growing or not, but instead continuously estimate how long economic cycles will last — i.e., they learn...

Using new textual analysis techniques to extract a broad set of disclosed risk factors from firms' SEC filings, I examine characteristics of the firms and industries most likely to make each type of disclosure, and investigate the relation between firms' risk disclosures and their stock return...

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...

Information gathering is an instinctive response to uncertainty, but such efforts may not fully resolve the uncertainty that prompted them. This implies that proxies for investor information gathering may endogenously reflect investor uncertainty, not only before but also after information...

Companies have overlapping exposures to many different features that might plausibly affect their returns, like whether they're involved in a crowded trade, whether they're mentioned in an M&A rumor, or whether their supplier recently missed an earnings forecast. Yet, at any point in time, only...