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...

Stock prices reflect firm performance and aggregate investor information about investment opportunities. We show that these dual roles are in tension: when prices are more informative about future investment, they are less effective at incentivizing managerial effort. Overall firm value need not...