Using a large representative sample of Indian retail equity investors, many of them new to the stock market, we show that recent investment experiences affect portfolio composition. Because investors are imperfectly diversified, cross-sectional variation in their investment experiences allows us...

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...

The VIX barely drops at macro-announcements. This is at odds with virtually all models that attempt to explain the "macro-announcement premium." We point out that the macro-announcement sample is too small, considering the high volatility and fat tail of daily returns. Our small-sample argument...

I introduce a method for gauging the qualitative similarity of firm-specific information based on linguistic commonality in newswire text. I show that this new qualitative similarity measure predicts future cross-firm return correlation even after accounting for the pair's contemporaneous price...

This paper exploits hand-collected data on illegal insider trades to provide new evidence of the ability of standard measures of illiquidity to detect informed trading. Controlling for unobserved cross-sectional and time-series variation, sampling bias, and strategic timing of insider trades, I...

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...

We build an equilibrium model to explain why stock return predictability concentrates in bad times. The key feature is that investors use different forecasting models, and hence assess uncertainty differently. As economic conditions deteriorate, uncertainty rises and investors' opinions...

We provide the first large-scale study of the performance of expected-return proxies (ERPs) internationally. Analyst-forecast-based ICCs are sparsely populated and not robustly associated with future returns. Earnings-model-forecast-based ICCs are well-populated, but are unreliable outside the...

In this paper we survey the theoretical and empirical literatures on market liquidity. We organize both literatures around three basic questions: (a) how to measure illiquidity, (b) how illiquidity relates to underlying market imperfections and other asset characteristics, and (c) how...

We study the impact of analyst forecasts on prices to determine whether investors learn about analyst accuracy. The straight-forward relationship between supply and price, the economic importance of the market, the predictable timing of forecast error realizations, and the high frequency of the...