Using the monthly returns of 37,854 firms in 23 developed markets over the period 1990-2015, we document that multinational companies earn higher returns than domestic companies by 24 basis points per month. This finding is further confirmed by using a sample of 18,996 U.S. firms over the period...

We provide an easy method to identify purchases and sales initiated by retail investors using recent, widely available U.S. equity transactions data. Individual stocks with net buying by retail investors outperform stocks with negative imbalances by approximately 10 basis points over the...

Using multiple short sale measures, we examine the predictive power of short sales for future stock returns in 38 countries from July 2006 to December 2014. We find that the days-to-cover ratio and utilization ratio measures have the most robust predictive power for future stock returns in the...

Hansen and Jagannathan (1997) have developed two measures of pricing errors for asset-pricing models: the maximum pricing error in all static portfolios of the test assets and the maximum pricing error in all contingent claims of the assets. In this paper, we develop simulation-based Bayesian...

We examine aggregate idiosyncratic volatility in 23 developed equity markets, measured using various methodologies, and we find no evidence of upward trends when we extend the sample till 2008. Instead, idiosyncratic volatility appears to be well described by a stationary autoregressive process...

Stocks with recent past high idiosyncratic volatility have low future average returns around the world. Across 23 developed markets, the difference in average returns between the extreme quintile portfolios sorted on idiosyncratic volatility is -1.31% per month, after controlling for world...

This study empirically investigates the effects of options trading on future stock returns. Leveraging the Shanghai Stock Exchange 50 exchange-traded fund (50ETF) options trading data in China, we show that put-call ratios, skewness ratios, and China's Volatility Index exhibit economically and...

Using intraday 2015-2019 short sale data from CBOE and FINRA, we examine the intraday time patterns and information content of on-exchange and off-exchange shorting. Midday short sales and those near the open strongly and negatively predict the cross-section of stock returns at daily horizons...

Using 2020-2021 data from social media platform Reddit, we examine connections among stockprices, retail trading, short-selling and social media activity. Higher Reddit traffic, more positivetone, and higher Reddit connectedness predict higher returns, greater and more positive retail orderflow,...

Retail investors are heterogeneous, with vast differences in wealth, skills and demographics. Using comprehensive proprietary account-level data on trading and holdings from the Shanghai Stock Exchange from 2016 to 2019, we separate tens of millions of retail investors into five groups by their...