We create a market-wide measure of dispersion in options investors' expectations by aggregating across all stocks the dispersion in trading volume across moneynesses (DISP). DISP exhibits strong negative predictive power for future market returns and its information content is not subsumed by...

We compare actual R&D spend with the managerial rhetoric around technology and innovation contained within corporate disclosures of US-listed firms. We find that, whilst actual R&D spend and patents do not entice institutional investors to increase their stock holdings, firms that espouse...

This paper examines whether tone (positive and negative) and volume of firm-specific news media content provide valuable information about future stock returns, using UK news media data from 1981–2010. The results indicate that both tone and volume of news media content significantly predict...

We show that economic activity plays an important role in explaining momentum-based anomalies. A simple two-factor model containing the market and alternative indicators of economic activity as risk factors---industrial production, capacity utilization rate, retail sales, and a broad economic...

This paper studies the importance of stock market literacy and trust for stock ownership decisions. We find that these two distinct channels simultaneously explain not only the probability of participation, but, conditional on participation, also explain the share of investment in stocks. Once...