Behavioral biases like disposition effect and overconfidence have received much attention as a potential driver of numerous anomalies observed in the markets. Also, it has been argued that information uncertainty tends to exacerbate these biases and induce stronger irrational behavior among...

Using new textual analysis techniques to extract a broad set of disclosed risk factors from firms' SEC filings, I examine characteristics of the firms and industries most likely to make each type of disclosure, and investigate the relation between firms' risk disclosures and their stock return...

This paper exploits hand-collected data on illegal insider trades to provide new evidence of the ability of standard measures of illiquidity to detect informed trading. Controlling for unobserved cross-sectional and time-series variation, sampling bias, and strategic timing of insider trades, I...

In this note we present several thought experiments involving coin-flipping to illustrate the common tendency to over-weight past data in forecasting the future, particularly in the context of investment returns. We start by describing a survey we conducted of about 700 respondents involving the...

This paper studies information aggregation in financial markets with recurrent investor exit and entry. I consider a dynamic general equilibrium model of asset trading with private information and collateral constraints. Investors differ in their aversion to Knightian uncertainty: When...

This paper examines the relation between investor overconfidence and the idiosyncratic volatility of stock returns. We use investor sentiment, stock turnover, stock misvaluation, and institutional ownership to measure the influence of investor overconfidence on stocks, and find that...

We track trading activity in the days preceding acquisition announcements for target firms, and find that abnormally high trading volume precedes significant price movement. Using additional intraday data, we find increased active-selling in target stocks before acquisition announcements that...

We outline a framework in which accounting “valuation anchors" could be connected to expected stock returns. Under two general conditions, expected log returns is a log- linear function of a valuation (market value-to-accounting) multiple and the expected growth in the valuation anchor. We...

A sound policy for spending wealth over time is as important as a sensible investment policy. It's a complex problem for taxable individuals with finite, uncertain longevity. A good start is thinking about the simpler problem of how one would spend if immortal. This is exactly the real problem...

This experiment examines forecasting behavior under varying information conditions to assess the extent to which traders in security markets incorporate information in trading activity to resolve fundamental uncertainty and to resolve higher-order uncertainty. Fundamental uncertainty refers to a...