The paper explores whether the co-movement of market returns and equity fund flows can be explained by a common response to macroeconomic news. I find that variables that predict the real economy as well as the equity premium are related to mutual fund flows. Changes in dividend-price ratio...

Recent empirical research suggests that measures of investor sentiment have predictive power for future stock returns over the intermediate and long term. Given the widespread publication of sentiment indicators, smart investors should trade on the information conveyed by such indicators and...

We examine the information content of option and equity volumes when trade direction is unobserved. In a multimarket asymmetric information model, equity short-sale costs result in a negative relation between relative option volume and future firm value. In our empirical tests, firms in the...

Barberis and Shleifer (2003) argue that style investing generates momentum and reversals in style and individual asset returns, as well as comovement between individual assets and their styles. Consistent with these predictions, in some specifications, past style returns help explain future...

This paper examines the predictability of corporate bond returns using the transaction-based index data for the period from October 1, 2002 to December 31, 2010. We find evidence of significant serial and cross-serial dependence in daily investment-grade and high-yield bond returns. The serial...

This study measures the degree of short-horizon return predictability of 50 international equity markets and examines how its variation is related to the indicators of equity market development. Two multiple-horizon variance ratio tests are employed to measure the degree of return...

This paper proposes a new approach for incorporating theoretical constraints on return forecasting models such as non-negativity of the conditional equity premium and sign restrictions on the coefficients linking state variables to the equity premium. Our approach makes use of Bayesian methods...

We construct investor sentiment indices for six major stock markets and decompose them into one global and six local indices. In a validation test, we find that relative sentiment is correlated with the relative prices of dual-listed companies. Global sentiment is a contrarian predictor of...

We examine the asymmetry in the predictive power of investor sentiment in the cross-section of stock returns across economic expansion and recession states. We test the implication of behavioral theories and evidence that the return predictability of sentiment should be most pronounced in an...

The dynamic dependencies in financial market volatility are generally well described by a long-memory fractionally integrated process. At the same time, the volatility risk premium, defined as the difference between the ex-post realized volatility and the market’s ex-ante expectation thereof,...