Investors increasingly can obtain assistance from “robo-advisors,” artificial intelligence–enabled digitalized service agents imbued with anthropomorphic design elements that can communicate using natural language. The present article considers the impact of anthropomorphized robo-advisors...

Using a news-based gauge of geopolitical risk, we study its role for asset pricing in global emerging markets. We find that changes in risk positively predict future stock returns. The countries with the highest increase in geopolitical uncertainty outperform their counterparts with the lowest...

We study the effects of a direct high-speed rail (HSR) service between two cities on investors and firms in China. We find that, after an HSR introduction, investors make more cross-city searches and block purchases of firms in connected cities. An HSR introduction also leads to less co-movement...

This paper shows that market breadth, i.e. the difference between the average number of rising stocks and the average number of falling stocks within a portfolio, is a robust predictor of future stock returns on market and industry portfolios for 64 countries for the period between 1973 and...

We systematically investigate the links between price returns and ESG features. We propose across-validation scheme with random company-wise validation to mitigate the relative initial lackof quantity and quality of ESG data, which allows us to use most of the latest and best data toboth train...

This study sheds new light on the question of whether or not sentiment surveys, and the expectations derived from them, are relevant to forecasting economic growth and stock returns, and whether they contain information that is orthogonal to macroeconomic and financial data. I examine 16...

We find that global time series carry strategies (across bonds, commodities, currencies, equities and metals) can be explained by a set of lagged macroeconomic variables. The payoffs to carry strategies disappear once futures returns are adjusted for their predictability based on these...

We propose a model of volatility tail behavior, in which the pricing measure dominates the physical measure in both tails of the volatility distribution and, hence, the derived pricing kernel exhibits an increasing and decreasing region in the volatility dimension. The model features investors...

To understand macroeconomic risks underlying currency carry trades, I propose exploiting rich source of information from analysts’ economic growth forecasts. Specifically, I obtain measures of global growth prospects from the cross-analyst distribution of real GDP growth forecasts. I find that...