A survey compared speculative behavior in two groups of institutional investors. The "experimental" group held stocks that had shown extraordinary price increases over the preceding year that also had high price earnings ratios. The control group held randomly selected stocks. In Shiller and...

Contagion or epidemic models of financial markets are proposed in which interest in or attention to individual stocks is spread by word of mouth. The models give alternative interpretations of the random walk character of stock prices. A questionnaire survey of institutional investors was...

This article examines the effects of takeover rumors on stock prices using a sample of rumors published in the WALL STREET JOURNAL's "Heard on the Street" column. We find that the market reacts efficiently to rumors; simple trading strategies based on buying or selling rumored targets' stocks...