Firm-specific information can affect expected returns if it affects investor uncertainty about risk-factor loadings. We show that a stock's expected return is decreasing in factor-loading uncertainty, controlling for the average level of its factor loading. When loadings are persistent, learning...

Reputational concerns have commonly been perceived to have a positive effect on auditing firms' execution of their monitoring and attesting functions. This paper demonstrates that this need not always be the case by studying a two-period game of repeated interaction between a manager and an...

We examine a duopolistic setting in which firms can preannounce their future competitive decisions before they actually implement them. We show that there is a unique equilibrium in which both firms preannounce and overstate their future actions when uncertainty of demand is low. We find that...

The article develops a dynamic model that nests the rational expectations (RE) and differences of opinion (DO) approaches to study how investors use prices to update their valuations. When investors condition on prices (RE), investor disagreement is related positively to expected returns, return...

Regulatory restrictions and market frictions can constrain the aggregate quantity of long and short positions in a security. When these constraints bind, we refer to the security as scarce, and its price becomes distorted relative to its value in a frictionless market. We show that an otherwise...

Motivated by the insight of Keynes (1936) on the importance of higher-order beliefs in financial markets, we examine the role of such beliefs in generating drift in asset prices. We show that in a dynamic setting, a higher-order difference of opinions is necessary for heterogeneous beliefs to...

The empirical evidence on investor disagreement and trading volume is difficult to reconcile in standard rational expectations models. We develop a dynamic model in which investors disagree about the interpretation of public information. We obtain a closed-form linear equilibrium that allows us...

Bernile and Jarrell provide extensive analysis regarding the impact of backdating the stock option exercise price on stock returns for a sample of firms identified by the Wall Street Journal. Dhaliwal, Erickson, and Heitzman investigate whether executives backdate the exercise date to obtain...