Do equity investors care about pay dispersion and income inequality? We address this question by examining equity markets' reaction and investors' portfolio rebalancing in response to the first-time disclosure by U.S. public companies of the ratio of CEO to median worker pay in 2018. We find...

We derive new bounds on the rational variation in asset prices over time. The resulting test requires no proxy for fundamental value, and it allows significantly more flexibility in preferences and discount rates than in standard volatility tests. We gain traction by focusing specifically on...

This study investigates the response of stock prices and equity options to negative ESG incidents reported by RepRisk for S&P 500 companies between 2006 and 2021, considering the increasing significance of ESG ratings among fund managers and the widespread utilization of financial derivatives by...

Using a semi-supervised topic model on 7,000,000 New York Times articles spanning 160 years, we test whether topics of media discourse predict future stock and bond market returns to test rational and behavioral hypotheses about market valuation of disaster risk. Focusing on media discourse...

We reveal a novel channel through which market participants' sentiment influences how they forecast stock returns: their optimism (pessimism) affects the weights they assign to fundamentals. Our analysis yields four main findings. First, if good (bad) “news” about dividends and interest...

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 examines the equity market return predictability of institutional investor sentiment, in comparison to individual investor sentiment. Our findings suggest that institutional traders are informed, and that their sentiment helps tilting stock prices towards the intrinsic value. This is...

I examine how financial markets interact with news about the COVID-19 pandemic. A twelve topic model optimizes the trade-off between number of topics and topic coherence. Using this model, I show that before mid-March 2020 markets react more to the same quantum of news when volatility is higher...

There has been substantial growth in the incorporation of environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues into investment decisions, and this trend has been motivated by the societal benefits that are achieved when socially responsible firms have access to cheaper capital. While the benefits...

We study earnings per share (EPS) forecast revision and accuracy of banking analysts around operational risk event announcements in U.S. banks. We find that first announcements of operational risk events are more informative than their settlement announcements. Optimistic banking analysts revise...