We provide evidence using data from the G7 countries suggesting that return dispersion may serve as an economic state variable in that it reliably predicts time-variation in economic activity, market returns, the value and momentum premia and market volatility. A relatively high return...

Today we live in a post-truth and highly digitalized era characterized by a flow of (mis-) information around the world. Identifying the impact of this information on stock markets and forecasting stock returns and volatilities has become a much more difficult task, perhaps almost impossible....

We reveal a novel channel through which market participants' sentiment influences how they forecast stock returns: their optimism (pessimism) affects the weights they assign to fundamentals. Our analysis yields four main findings. First, if good (bad) “news” about dividends and interest...

This paper examines the equity market return predictability of institutional investor sentiment, in comparison to individual investor sentiment. Our findings suggest that institutional traders are informed, and that their sentiment helps tilting stock prices towards the intrinsic value. This is...

Predicted stock issuers (PSIs) are firms with expected “high-investment and low-profit” (HILP) profiles that earn unusually low returns. We carefully document important features of PSI firms to provide insights on the economic mechanism behind the HILP phenomenon. Top-PSI firms are...

This paper provides evidence that the market does not efficiently incorporate expected returns implied by analyst price targets into prices. I use a novel decomposition to extract information and bias components from these analyst-expected returns and develop an asset pricing framework that...

We explore the effects of fundamental extrapolation on stock returns. Empirically, we propose a novel approach to extrapolate firms' fundamental information and find that a strategy based on fundamental extrapolation earns an average return of 0.80% per month. Theoretically, we show that...

The classical Friday the 13th Effect refers to a calendar anomaly of financial markets which is generated by the fear of bad luck shared by the superstitious investors. As a result of their behavior, the returns from the supposed unlucky day of Friday the 13th are significant lower than those...

Socially responsible (SR) institutions tend to focus more on the ESG performance and less on quantitative signals of value. Consistent with this difference in focus, we find that SR institutions react less to quantitative mispricing signals. Our evidence suggests that the increased focus on ESG...