We look into determinants (volatility, crises, sentiment and the U.S. ‘fear’ index) of herding using BRICS as our sample. Investors herd selectively to crises and herding is a short-lived phenomenon. Herding was highest during the global financial crisis (only China was affected). There was...

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...

The classical Friday the 13th Effect refers to a calendar anomaly of financial markets which is generated by the fear of bad luck shared by the superstitious investors. As a result of their behavior, the returns from the supposed unlucky day of Friday the 13th are significant lower than those...

Using proprietary data from a major fund data provider, we analyze the screening activity of investment consultants (ICs) who advise institutional investors with trillions of dollars in assets. We find that ICs frequently shortlist funds using threshold screens clustered at round, base 5 or base...

Republicans start more firms than Democrats. Using a sample of 27 million party-identified Americans between 1997 and 2017, we find that 8% of Republicans and 5% of Democrats become entrepreneurs. This partisan entrepreneurship gap is time-varying: Republicans increase their relative...

Information about the possibilities of changes in national and international macroeconomic variables affects the expectations and behavior of individuals and firms more quickly than real changes in those macroeconomic variables. In this research, we investigate the impacts of international...

There are many well documented behavioral biases in financial markets. Yet, analyzing U.S. equities reveals that less than 1.21% of returns are predictable in recent years. Given the high number of biases, why are returns not more predictable? We provide two pieces of new evidence for one...

We look into determinants (volatility, crises, sentiment and the U.S. ‘fear’ index) of herding using BRICS as our sample. Investors herd selectively to crises and herding is a short-lived phenomenon. Herding was highest during the global financial crisis (only China was affected). There was...

We propose a technique to avoid spurious detections of jumps in high-frequency data via an explicit thresholding on available test statistics. We prove that it eliminates asymptotically all spurious detections. Monte Carlo results show that it performs also well in finite samples. In Dow Jones...

This paper builds a model of high-frequency equity returns by separately modeling the dynamics of trade-time returns and trade arrivals. Our main contributions are threefold. First, we characterize the distributional behavior of high-frequency asset returns both in ordinary clock time and in...