We utilize a novel data about households' reservation returns to reexamine the limited stock market participations and the equity premium puzzles, where instead of asking why households are too averse to risk, we ask why households exhibit greater reservation returns (which reflect the...

We introduce new financial calendar anomalies on post holidays as well as best and worst day of the year. We find that the excess return in the stock market abnormal returns post major holidays: Thanksgiving (Black Friday), Christmas and New Year. Furthermore, we analyze the best and worst day...

Political science theories suggest that U.S. presidents' tenures in office share distinct phases, which have systematic characteristics, that span party ideologies. However, limited attention has been paid to the relation between the presidential life cycle and financial markets. We document...

We develop an index, termed the Government Legislative Index (GLX), that measures the ability of the US Government to execute legislation. In essence, the GLX measures the ability of the President and the ruling party to successfully convert proposed legislation into rules and regulations....

We show that stock prices underreact when there is a political event, reflected in higher momentum returns. We conjecture that political news crowds out stock news cause investors to distract, trade more indexes and underreact to firm specific news. We analyze momentum returns following general...

This paper shows that the Warren Buffet Indicator (BI) about stock market valuation, measured as the overall stock market value divided by GDP, contains an upward bias and not a proper indicator for three main reasons. Primarily, over 40% of the S&P companies’ earnings is overseas, which makes...

We show that key congress characteristics influence stock market outcomes, and under-diversified congress depresses the performance and upsurge the volatility in the stock market. Our key hypotheses is that congress background influences type, quantity and quality of bills passed, and hence...

We show that the stock market pricing the presidential margin of victory in a nonlinear concave fashion, with a higher price for medium than slight or crushing victories. We conjecture that the margin of victory reflects president confidence and the ability to execute policies. A small margin...