The thoughts and behaviors of financial market participants depend upon adopted cultural traits, including information signals, beliefs, strategies, and folk economic models. Financial traits compete to survive in the human population, and are modified in the process of being transmitted from...

We offer an explanation for the forward premium puzzle in foreign exchange markets based upon investor overconfidence. In the model, overconfident individuals overreact to their information about future inflation, which causes greater overshooting in the forward rate than in the spot rate. Thus,...

Existing research has documented cross-sectional seasonality of stock returns--the periodic outperformance of certain stocks relative to others during the same calendar month, weekday, or pre-holiday periods. A model in which stocks differ in their sensitivities to investor mood explains these...

Psychological evidence indicates that decision quality declines after an extensive session of decision-making, a phenomenon known as decision fatigue. We study whether decision fatigue affects analysts' judgments. Analysts cover multiple firms and often issue several forecasts in a single day....

We offer a new social approach to investment decision making and asset prices. Investors discuss their strategies and convert others to their strategies with a probability that increases in investment returns. The conversion rate is shown to be convex in realized returns. Unconditionally, active...

Recent theories suggest that both risk and mispricing are associated with commonality in security returns, and that the loadings on characteristic-based factors can be used to predict future returns. We supplement the market factor with two mispricing factors which capture long- and...

We examine the causal effect of limits to arbitrage on 11 well-known asset pricing anomalies using Regulation SHO, which relaxed short-sale constraints for a random set of pilot stocks, as a natural experiment. We find that the anomalies became weaker on portfolios constructed with pilot stocks...

Ambiguity aversion alone does not explain the market nonparticipation puzzle. We show that in a rational expectations equilibrium model with a fund offering the risk-adjusted market portfolio (RAMP), ambiguity averse investors hold the fund and an information-based portfolio, and thus...

We test how market overvaluation affects corporate innovation. Estimated stock overvaluation is very strongly associated with R&D, innovative output, and measures of innovative novelty, originality, and scope. R&D is much more sensitive than capital investment to overvaluation. Misvaluation...

We propose that innovative originality (InnOrig) is a valuable organizational resource, and that owing to limited investor attention and skepticism of complexity, firms with greater InnOrig are undervalued. We find that firms' InnOrig strongly predicts higher, more persistent, and less volatile...