This paper examines whether investors exhibit a New Year's gambling preference and whether such preference impacts prices and returns of assets with lottery features. In January, calls options have higher demand than put options, especially by small investors. In addition, relative to...

Behavioral theories suggest that investor misperceptions and market mispricing will be correlated across firms. This paper uses equity financing to identify comovement in returns and commonality in misvaluation. A zero-investment portfolio (UMO, Undervalued Minus Overvalued) built from...

Behavioral theories suggest that investor misperceptions and market mispricing will be correlated across firms. We use equity and debt financing to identify common misvaluation across firms. A zero-investment portfolio (UMO, Undervalued Minus Overvalued) built from repurchase and new issue firms...

We examined prospect theory and reference point adaptation following gains or losses using participants from China, Korea, and the US. Supporting prospect theory, we found in Studies 1 and 2 that subjects from all three countries generally exhibited loss aversion and a greater propensity for...

According to prospect theory (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979), gains and losses are measured from current wealth, which serves as a reference point. We attempted to ascertain to what extent the reference point shifts following gains or losses. In questionnaire studies we asked subjects what stock...

Using event studies, we show that short-sale constraints play an important role in the negative relation between idiosyncratic volatility and stock returns. We explore three exogenous events that change short-sale constraints: the IPO lockup period expiration, option introduction, and the recent...

This paper develops two competing hypotheses for the relation between the cross-sectional standard deviation of logarithmic firm fundamental-to-price ratios (``dispersion'') and expected aggregate returns. In models with fully rational beliefs, greater dispersion indicates greater risk and...

We examined reference point adaptation following gains or losses in security trading using participants from China, Korea, and the US. In both questionnaire studies and trading experiments with real money incentives, reference point adaptation was larger for Asians than for Americans. Subjects...

The underperformance of high idiosyncratic volatility stocks, as documented by Ang, Hodrick, Ying, and Zhang (2006, JF), is a pure non-January phenomenon. This non-January negative relation between idiosyncratic volatility and stock returns is more pronounced among firms with greater constraints...