We find that the stock market underreacts to stock-level liquidity shocks: liquidity shocks are not only positively associated with contemporaneous returns, but they also predict future return continuations for up to six months. Long-short portfolios sorted on liquidity shocks generate significant returns of 0.70% to 1.20% per month that are robust across alternative shock measures and after controlling for risk factors and stock characteristics. Furthermore, we show that investor inattention and illiquidity contribute to the underreaction: while both are significant in explaining short-term return predictability of liquidity shocks, the inattention-based mechanism is more powerful for the longer-term return predictability.

We present resiliency as a measure of liquidity and assess its relationship to expected returns. We establish a covariance-based measure, RES, that captures opening period resiliency, and use it to find a significant nonresiliency premium that ranges from 33 to 57 basis points per month. The premium persists after accounting for an extensive list of other liquidity-related measures and control variables. The results are significant for both value-weighted and equal-weighted returns, when micro-cap stocks are excluded, and for a sample of large cap stocks. The premium is particularly pronounced when trading volume is high. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online.

We find that the stock market underreacts to stock-level liquidity shocks: liquidity shocks are not only positively associated with contemporaneous returns, but they also predict future return continuations for up to six months. Long-short portfolios sorted on liquidity shocks generate significant returns of 0.70% to 1.20% per month that are robust across alternative shock measures and after controlling for risk factors and stock characteristics. Furthermore, we show that investor inattention and illiquidity contribute to the underreaction: while both are significant in explaining short-term return predictability of liquidity shocks, the inattention-based mechanism is more powerful for the longer-term return predictability.

We study how the social transmission of public news influences investors’ beliefs and the securities markets. Using data on social networks, we find that earnings announcements from firms in higher-centrality counties generate a stronger immediate price, volatility, and trading volume reactions. Post-announcement, such firms experience weaker price drift and faster volatility decay but higher and more persistent volume. These findings suggest greater social connectedness facilitates the timely incorporation of news into prices, as well as opinion divergence and excessive trading. We propose the social churning hypothesis, which is confirmed using granular data from StockTwits messages and household trading records.

We investigate how communication within banks affects small business lending. Using travel times between a bank’s headquarters and its branches to proxy for the costs of communicating soft information, we exploit shocks to these travel times—the introduction of new airline routes—to evaluate the impact of within-bank communication costs on small business loans. We find that reducing headquarters-branch travel time boosts small business lending in the branch’s county. Several extensions suggest that new airline routes facilitate in-person communications that boost small-firm lending.

We show that institutional investors are more likely to invest in firms from regions to which they have stronger social ties but find no evidence that these investments earn a differential return. Firms in regions with stronger social ties to locations with many institutional investors have higher valuations and liquidity. These effects are largest for small firms with little analyst coverage, suggesting that the investors’ behavior is explained by their increased awareness of firms in socially proximate locations. Our results highlight that the social structure of regions affects firms’ access to capital and contributes to geographic differences in economic outcomes. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online.