This paper argues that an important part of movements in asset prices may be caused by neither external news nor irrationality, but by the revelation of information by the trading process itself. Two models are developed that illustrate this general idea. One model is based on investor uncertainty about the quality of other investors' information; the other is based on widespread dispersion of ...

Using audit trail data for a sample of NYSE firms we show that medium-size trades are associated with a disproportionately large cumulative stock price change relative to their proportion of all trades and volume. This result is consistent with the predictions of Barclay and Warner’s (1993) stealth-trading hypothesis. We find that the source of this disproportionately large cumulative price imp...

Recent empirical research in finance has uncovered two families of pervasive regularities: underreaction of stock prices to news such as earnings announcements, and overreaction of stock prices to a series of good or bad news. In this paper, we present a parsimonious model of investor sentiment, or of how investors form beliefs, which is consistent with the empirical findings. The model is base...

We analyze a model in which traders have different trading opportunities and learn information from prices. The difference in trading opportunities implies that different traders may have different trading motives when trading in the same market—some trade for speculation and others for hedging—and thus they may respond to the same information in opposite directions. This implies that adding mo...

Financial press reports claim that internet stock message boards can move markets. We study the effect of more than 1.5 million messages posted on Yahoo! Finance and Raging Bull about the 45 companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and the Dow Jones Internet Index. The bullishness of the messages is measured using computational linguistics methods. News stories reported in the Wall Street...

During 1999-2001 more than 35 million messages about public firms were posted on Yahoo! Finance. This paper examines whether stocks with high posting levels also have unusual subsequent returns and/or risk. They do. Stocks with the highest level of posting have unusually high realized volatility and unusually poor subsequent returns. This remains true after accounting for the effects of the mar...

Motivated by psychological evidence that attention is a scarce cognitive resource, we model investors’ attention allocation in learning and study the effects of this on asset-price dynamics. We show that limited investor attention leads to category-learning behavior, i.e., investors tend to process more market and sector-wide information than firm-specific information. This endogenous structure...

This paper provides a dynamic rational expectations equilibrium model in which investors have heterogeneous information and investment opportunities. Informed investors privately receive advance information about future earnings that is unrelated to current earnings. In response to good advance information, stock prices increase and informed investors act as trend chasers, increasing their inve...

If returns are not predictable, dividend growth must be predictable, to generate the observed variation in divided yields. I find that the absence of dividend growth predictability gives stronger evidence than does the presence of return predictability. Long-horizon return forecasts give the same strong evidence. These tests exploit the negative correlation of return forecasts with dividend-yie...

Donald Trump’s election was a significant surprise. The reaction of company stock prices to the election reflects shifts in investor expectations about economic growth, taxes, and trade policy. High-beta stocks outperformed, presumably due to strengthened growth expectations. Expectations of significant corporate tax cuts boosted high-tax firms, but hurt firms with significant net operating los...