What would you do if you were invited to play a game where you were given $25 and allowed to place bets for 30 minutes on a coin that you were told was biased to come up heads 60% of the time? This is exactly what we did, gathering 61 young, quantitatively trained men and women to play this...

These days it's become convention (reinforced by the media's treatment of wealth) to assess our net worth by tallying up the market value of our financial assets, even though it's more natural and useful to think of our wealth as a stream of dollars over time given the nature of our income and...

We investigate the extent to which international and domestic economic policy uncertainty (EPU) impacts analysts’ earnings forecasts for Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) listed firms. Over a twenty-year period, we demonstrate that EPU is positively associated with analyst coverage, the...

Straddles on individual stocks generally earn significantly negative returns. However, average at the money straddles from three days before an earnings announcement to the announcement date yield a highly significant 3.34% return. The positive returns on straddles indicate that investors...

We compare several representative sophisticated model averaging and variable selection techniques of forecasting stock returns. When estimated traditionally, our results confirm that the simple combination of individual predictors is superior. However, sophisticated models improve dramatically...

This study examines the association between chief executive officer (CEO) overconfidence and future stock price crash risk. Overconfident managers overestimate the returns to their investment projects and misperceive negative net present value (NPV) projects as value creating. They also tend to...

I use classification-based machine-learning methods to decompose 32 anomaly payoffsinto risk exposures and mispricing. The component driven by risk earns statistically insignificantreturns, despite its efficacy in explaining the time-series variation in anomaly payoffs.The mispricing component...

Companies have overlapping exposures to many different features that might plausibly affect their returns, like whether they're involved in a crowded trade, whether they're mentioned in an M&A rumor, or whether their supplier recently missed an earnings forecast. Yet, at any point in time, only...

I develop a model of statistical arbitrage trading in an environment with "fat-tailed" information. If risk-neutral arbitrageurs are uncertain about the variance of fat-tail shocks and if they implement max-min robust optimization, they will choose to ignore a wide range of pricing errors....

This study investigates whether CEO Big Five personalities (i.e., agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism and openness) are associated with stock price crash risk. The Big Five can influence managerial behaviors to withhold or release bad news. When the amount of withheld...