In this paper we provide empirical findings on the significance of positive feedback trading for the return behavior in the German stock market. Relying on the ShillerSentana-Wadhwani model, we use the link between index return auto-correlation and volatility to obtain a better understanding into the return characteristics generated by traders adhering to positive feedback trading strategies. O...

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...

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...

I provide a typology of social capital, breaking it down into seven more fundamental forms of capital: information capital, brokerage capital, coordination and leadership capital, bridging capital, favor capital, reputation capital, and community capital. I discuss how most of these forms of social capital can be identified using different network-based measures. JEL Classification Codes: D85, ...

This paper uses data collected from eBay’s website to identify why buyers fail to leave (negative) feedback in online markets. Empirical results confirm that the fear of retaliation may be an important motivation for buyers not to leave (negative) feedback, while the time and effort cost of reporting may be not. keywords: reputation, feedback, asymmetric information JEL classification: L81; L86

This paper provides an empirical analysis of the trading behavior and the impact of new investors on the bubble surrounding the Baosteel call warrant, the first derivative traded in China after a nine-year suspension. First, we find that the new investors initiated the bubble. Second, echoing common wisdom, we empirically show that the continuous entries of new investors sustained the bubble. T...

Together with a sense of entering a New Economy, the US experienced in the second half of the 1990s an economic expansion, a stock market boom, a financing boom for new firms and productivity gains. In this paper, we propose an interpretation of these events within a general equilibrium model with financial frictions and decreasing returns to scale in production. We show that the mere prospect ...

In this paper we consider the dynamics of spot and futures prices in the presence of arbitrage. We propose a partially linear error correction model where the adjustment coefficient is allowed to depend non-linearly on the lagged price difference. We estimate our model using data on the DAX index and the DAX futures contract. We find that the adjustment is indeed nonlinear. The linear alternati...

Investment banks legally pursue supposedly price stabilizing activities in the aftermarket of IPOs. We model the offering procedure as a signaling game and analyze how the possibility of potentially profitable trading in the aftermarket influences pricing decisions by investment banks. When maximizing the sum of both the gross spread of the offer revenue and profits from aftermarket trading, in...

I present evidence of inefficient information processing in equity markets by documenting that negative information withheld by securities analysts is incorporated in stock prices with a significant delay. I estimate the extent of the withheld negative information based on the proportion of analysts who stop revising their annual earnings forecasts. This measure predicts negative earnings surpr...