The effects of sentiment should be strongest during times of heightened valuation uncertainty. As such, we document a significant amplifying role for market uncertainty in the relation between sentiment and aggregate investment. A one-standard-deviation increase in uncertainty more than doubles...

Using a recently developed measure of financial market risk perceptions, we show that market risk perceptions affect firm-level corporate investment and financing. While multiple channels drive these results, we find evidence that firms cater to investors’ preferences. When perceived risk is...

We examine how banks respond to large natural disasters when corporate borrowers are located in the neighborhood of the disaster area. We find robust evidence that banks charge significantly higher loan spreads for firms located in the neighborhood of the disaster area than for remote firms. The...

Financial advisors use questionnaires and discussions with clients to determine a suitable portfolio of assets that will allow clients to reach their investment objectives. Financial institutions assign risk ratings to each security they offer, and those ratings are used to guide clients and...

We decompose the excess market return into speculation and non-speculation components. The former is negative and predicted by market sentiment. The latter is positive and not predicted by sentiment. The speculation component explains roughly 30% of the variation in the excess market return. In...

We provide empirical evidence that visceral factors affect financial risk taking by showing that exposure to mass shootings alters mutual fund managers' risk taking decisions. Funds that are exposed to mass shootings subsequently decrease risk relative to their peers. The effect that we document...

Natural disasters such as hurricanes, floods, heatwaves and wildfires are projected to become more prevalent in the foreseeable future. Climate risk is therefore increasingly recognized as an important factor by policy makers, the investment community, and financial markets. Due to the...

We show that the dynamics of Bitcoin (BTC) price are strongly influenced by the level of global geopolitical risk. Indeed, a number of well established stylized facts about BTC cease to be true when we condition the evolution of BTC returns on the GPR index. In particular, we find that when...

We hypothesize that greater economic policy uncertainty (EPU) leads to increases in unhealthy behaviors by lowering individuals' impulse control. Based on 6.1 million interviews over 22 years, our analysis reveals a positive relation between EPU and the propensity to make poor lifestyle choices...

Do illegal insiders internalize legal risk? We address this question with hand-collected data from530 SEC investigations. Using two plausibly exogenous shocks to expected penalties, we showthat insiders trade less aggressively and earlier and concentrate on tips of greater value whenfacing...