We study the transmission of financial news and opinions through social interactions. We identify a series of plausibly exogenous shocks, which cause “treated investors” to trade abnormally. We then trace the “contagion” of abnormal trading activity from the treated investors to their...

We use brokerage account records to study trading during the Chinese put warrants bubble and find evidence consistent with extrapolative theories of speculative asset price bubbles. We identify the event that started the bubble and show that investors engaged in a form of feedback trading based...

We study intraday, market-wide shocks to stock prices, market liquidity, and trading activity on international stock markets and assess the relevance of recent theories on "liquidity dry-ups" in explaining such shocks. Market-wide price shocks are prevalent and large, with rapid spillovers...

Many individual investors, mutual funds and institutions trade as if dividends and capital gains are disconnected attributes, not fully appreciating that dividends result in price decreases. Behavioral trading patterns (e.g. the disposition effect) are driven by price changes instead of total...

Experimental and field data suggest that a social factor, discrimination, affects the risk perceptions and portfolio decisions of U.S. households. Experiments indicate that minorities perceive greater income risk. Minorities with relatively high risk perceptions are 10% less likely to invest....

Predictable biases in analyst forecasts, both conservative and optimistic, distort share prices, but only for firms with hard-to-forecast earnings---those with extreme past returns, credit risk, idiosyncratic volatility, and other attributes linked to 14 popular anomalies. The prevalence of...