We use daily Internet search volume from millions of households to reveal market-level sentiment. By aggregating the volume of queries related to household concerns (e.g., "recession," "unemployment," and "bankruptcy"), we construct a Financial and Economic Attitudes Revealed by Search (FEARS) index as a new measure of investor sentiment. Between 2004 and 2011, we find FEARS (i) predict short-term return reversals, (ii) predict temporary increases in volatility, and (iii) predict mutual fund flows out of equity funds and into bond funds. Taken together, the results are broadly consistent with theories of investor sentiment.

[CEOs with large networks earn more than those with small networks. An additional connection to an executive or director outside the firm increases compensation by about $17,000 on average, more so for "important" members, such as CEOs of big firms. Pay-for-connectivity is unrelated to several measures of corporate governance, evidence in favor of an efficient contracting explanation for CEO pay.]

[We use exogenous scheduling of Wall Street Journal columnists to identify a causal relation between financial reporting and stock market performance. To measure the media's unconditional effect, we add columnist fixed effects to a daily regression of excess Dow Jones Industrial Average returns. Relative to standard control variables, these fixed effects increase the R² by about 35%, indicating each columnist's average persistent "bullishness" or "bearishness." To measure the media's conditional effect, we interact columnist fixed effects with lagged returns. This increases explanatory power by yet another one-third, and identifies amplification or attenuation of prevailing sentiment as a tool used by financial journalists.]

Analysts' price targets and recommendations contradict stock return anomaly variables. Using an index based on 125 anomalies, we find that analysts' annual stock return forecasts are 11% higher for anomaly-shorts than for anomaly-longs. Anomaly-shorts’ return forecasts are excessively optimistic, exceeding realized returns by 34%. Recommendations also tend to be more favorable for anomaly-shorts, although this result varies across anomaly types. Consistent with analysts' slowly incorporating anomaly information, anomalies forecast revisions in both price targets and recommendations. Our findings imply that investors who follow analysts' actionable information contribute to mispricing.

Firms in industry clusters have market prices that are more efficient than firms outside clusters. To establish causality, we analyze exogenous firm relocations and find that firms that relocate into industry clusters have higher levels of industry information in their prices. We argue that geographical proximity allows for information spillovers, reducing marginal cost to information producers. Our evidence supports this view: Analysts are more likely to cover stocks inside industry clusters, and when institutional investors have a large position in one stock in the industry cluster, they are more likely to hold other stocks in the same industry cluster.

We use party-identifying language—like “liberal media” and “MAGA”—to identify Republican users on the investor social platform StockTwits. Using a difference-in-difference design, we find that partisan Republicans remain relatively unfazed in their beliefs about equities during the COVID-19 pandemic, while other users become considerably more pessimistic. In cross-sectional tests, we find Republicans become relatively more optimistic about stocks that suffered the most during the COVID-19 crisis, but more pessimistic about Chinese stocks. Finally, stocks with the greatest partisan disagreement on StockTwits have significantly more trading in the broader market, explaining 28% of the increase in stock turnover during the pandemic. Authors have furnished data and an Internet Appendix, which are available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online.

ABSTRACT Using a sample of 97 stock return anomalies, we find that anomaly returns are 50% higher on corporate news days and six times higher on earnings announcement days. These results could be explained by dynamic risk, mispricing due to biased expectations, or data mining. We develop and conduct several unique tests to differentiate between these three explanations. Our results are most consistent with the idea that anomaly returns are driven by biased expectations, which are at least partly corrected upon news arrival.

ABSTRACT Republicans start more firms than Democrats. In a sample of 40 million party‐identified Americans between 2005 and 2017, we find that 5.5% of Republicans and 3.7% of Democrats become entrepreneurs. This partisan entrepreneurship gap is time‐varying—Republicans increase their relative entrepreneurship during Republican administrations and decrease it during Democratic administrations, amounting to a partisan reallocation of 170,000 new firms over our 13‐year sample. We find sharp changes in partisan entrepreneurship around the elections of President Obama and President Trump, with the strongest effects among the most politically active partisans: those that donate and vote.

ABSTRACT Using individual patient records for every hospital in California from 1983 to 2011, we find a strong inverse link between daily stock returns and hospital admissions, particularly for psychological conditions such as anxiety, panic disorder, and major depression. The effect is nearly instantaneous (within the same day) for psychological conditions, suggesting that anticipation over future consumption directly influences instantaneous utility.

We use exogenous scheduling of Wall Street Journal columnists to identify a causal relation between financial reporting and stock market performance. To measure the media's unconditional effect, we add columnist fixed effects to a daily regression of excess Dow Jones Industrial Average returns. Relative to standard control variables, these fixed effects increase the R-super-2 by about 35%, indicating each columnist's average persistent "bullishness" or "bearishness." To measure the media's conditional effect, we interact columnist fixed effects with lagged returns. This increases explanatory power by yet another one-third, and identifies amplification or attenuation of prevailing sentiment as a tool used by financial journalists. The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]., Oxford University Press.