This paper shows that stocks of truly local firms have returns that exceed the return on stocks of geographically dispersed firms by 70 basis points per month. By extracting state name counts from annual reports filed with the SEC on form 10-K, we distinguish firms with business operations in...

In this technical appendix we extend the results in the paper “Information sales and strategic trading.” We study the problem of a monopolist selling information to a set of risk-averse traders. We first analytically reduce the seller's problem to a simple constrained optimization, allowing...

We study a standard machine learning algorithm (Taddy, 2013) to measure sentiment in financial documents. Our empirical approach relies on stock price reactions to colour words, providing as output dictionaries of positive and negative words. We compare head-to-head the performance of the...

We study financial markets in which both rational and overconfident agents coexist and make endogenous information acquisition decisions. We demonstrate the following irrelevance result: when a positive fraction of rational agents (endogenously) decides to become informed in equilibrium, prices...

This paper studies the content of financial news as a function of past market returns. As a proxy for media content we use positive and negative word counts from general financial news columns from the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. Our empirical analysis allows us to discriminate...

We study the classical problem of raising capital under asymmetric information. Following Myers and Majluf (1984), we consider firms endowed with assets in place and riskier growth opportunities. When asymmetric information is concentrated on assets in place (rather than growth opportunities),...

This paper studies how relative wealth concerns, in which a person's satisfaction with their own consumption depends on how much others are consuming, affect investors' incentives to acquire information. We find that such externalities can generate complementarities in information acquisition...

We explain the size and the existence of the mutual fund industry by generalizing the standard competitive noisy rational expectations framework with endogenous information acquisition. Since informed agents optimally choose to open mutual funds in order to sell their private information, mutual...

We study a novel class of noisy rational expectations equilibria in markets with large number of agents. We show that, as long as noise (liquidity traders, endowment shocks) increases with the number of agents in the economy, the limiting competitive equilibrium is well-defined and leads to...