The correlation between stock characteristics and the cross-section of stock returns plays a central role in empirical implementations of modern asset pricing models and has important implications for investment management. This remains true whether the correlation is due to investor preferences...

On August 11, 2020 at 16:59 EDT, Tesla announced a 5-for-1 stock split. The trading in the after-market and during the subsequent two days amounts to a unique financial economic experiment. Although stock splits have no fundamental impact on value, Tesla's stock price rose 17.94% in the two days...

Americans now hold over $1 trillion in cryptocurrencies. Has $1 trillion in wealth been created? From the standpoint of economic theory, the answers is no. The wealth of a society consists of its real assets that produce consumable goods and services. Unless a cryptocurrency provides some type...

On Christmas Eve 2019 the MIT Technology Review published an article entitled, The 2010s were another lost decade on climate change. On New Year's Day the Washington Post published a longer article with the same title. Both pieces told basically the same story, one repeated by many...

One simple way for a hypothetical investor to update an estimate of expected returns is to apply the Bayes rule. In its simplest form this involves no information other than an estimate of the prior distribution and historical data on stock returns. However, such a simple method of updating...

One of the most significant empirical findings of the behavioral finance literature is that investor sentiment affects asset prices. Baker and Wurgler (2006) finds that shares of certain firms — those that are difficult to value — are more affected by shifts in investor sentiment. We examine...

A widely replicated result, using U.S. data, is that dividend-price ratios predict future returns, not future dividend growth. As noted by Cochrane (2011) in his Presidential Address to the American Finance Association, this is evidence of stock return predictability contrary to the original...

One of the prime pieces of evidence supporting the hypothesis that expected stock returns vary over time is that regressions of future returns on dividend-price ratios are highly significant, but future dividend growth is unrelated to the ratio. This paper presents another interpretation of...

This paper presents a detailed anatomy of the nearly sevenfold run-up in the price of Tesla stock between March 22, 2013 and February 26, 2014 with the goal of attempting to determine the role played by investor sentiment. Tesla offers a unique opportunity in this context because the run-up was...