Without any intervention, the novel coronavirus would cost the U.S. economy over $9 trillion. A suppression policy aims to reduce the number of new cases through strict social distancing measures by closing schools and non-essential businesses. Less restrictive, a mitigation policy aims to...

We identify all return leader-follower pairs among individual stocks using Granger causality regressions. Thus-identified leaders can reliably predict their followers' returns out of sample, and the return predictability works at the level of individual stocks rather than industries. Our results...

We show that news stories contain information about economic linkages between firms and document that information diffuses slowly across linked stocks. Specifically, we identify linked stocks from co-mentions in news stories and find that linked stocks cross-predict one another's returns in the...

This study demonstrates that the U.S. equity premium has declined significantly during the last three decades. The study calculates the equity premium using a variation of a formula in the classic Gordon stock valuation model. The calculation includes the bond yield, the stock dividend yield,...

We show that new managers who take over mutual fund portfolios typically proceed to sell off inherited momentum losers. They sell losers at higher rates than stocks in any other momentumdecile, even after adjusting for concurrent trades in these stocks by continuing fund managers. This behavior...

We present evidence of inefficient information processing in equity markets by documenting that negative information withheld by securities analysts is reflected in stock prices with a significant delay. We estimate the extent of the withheld negative information based on the proportion of...

We show that new managers who take over mutual fund portfolios typically proceed to sell off inherited momentum losers. They sell losers at higher rates than stocks in any other momentum decile, even after adjusting for concurrent trades in these stocks by continuing fund managers. This behavior...

We present evidence of inefficient information processing in equity markets by documenting that biases in analysts' earnings forecasts are reflected in stock prices. In particular, we show that investors fail to fully account for optimistic bias associated with analyst disagreement. This bias...

I provide empirical support for Miller's (1977) hypothesis that a stock price will reflect the optimistic view whenever there is disagreement about its value. Using dispersion in analyst earnings forecasts as a proxy for disagreement, I find that high-dispersion stocks earn lower returns than...

We provide evidence that stocks with higher dispersion in analysts' earnings forecasts earn lower future returns than otherwise similar stocks. This effect is most pronounced in small stocks, and stocks that have performed poorly over the past year. Interpreting dispersion in analysts' forecasts...