This paper looks at the effect of shareholder horizon on corporate behavior. In perfect capital markets, corporate behavior should be insensitive to shareholder horizon, but when investment opportunities are not well valued by the market, shareholder horizon matters. We first present a simple framework to show that shareholder horizon should be looked at in conjunction with stock misvaluation. ...

This work offers a theoretical explanation of the electronic commerce stock market bubble of 1999-2000. We propose that the bubble existed because a lack of good information about the potential value of electronic commerce led investors to rely on one another’s private valuations of electronic commerce. Because each investor relied on other investors, positive information early in the period wa...

This paper investigates the performance of efficient portfolios in a financial market with heterogeneous investors including rational traders, noise traders, and chartists. A generalization of the security market line result states that, regardless of the diversity of beliefs, the portfolios of rational investors with mean-variance preferences are mean-variance efficient in the sense of classic...

Short-termism need not breed informational price inefficiency even when generating Beauty Contests. We demonstrate this claim in a two-period market with persistent liquidity trading and risk-averse, privately informed, short-term investors and find that prices reflect average expectations about fundamentals and liquidity trading. Informed investors engage in “retrospective” learning to reasses...

The assumption that mood affects investors’ behavior in the field is gaining acceptance due to experimental studies and papers linking stock returns with environmental variables, such as weather and length of day. To identify mood effects this paper utilizes account level stock trading data from all investors in Finland, a country with significant variation in weather and length of day. While s...

This study examines the association between different institutional investors’ ownership and earnings management practice using a neural networks approach. It investigates this relationship for a sample of 121 US firms. We examine also the effect of institutional ownership on the level of accruals management of firms having different information environment (S&P 500 versus non S&P 500). Results...

The US Security and Exchange Commission implemented Regulation Fair Disclosure in 2000, requiring that an issuer must make relevant information disclosed to any investor available to the general public in a fair manner. Focusing on firms that are affected by the regulation, we propose a model that characterizes the behavior of two types of investors—one professional investor and many small inve...