We show empirically that survey-based measures of expected inflation are significant and strong predictors of future aggregate stock returns in several industrialized countries both in-sample and out-of-sample. By empirically discriminating between competing sources of this return predictability...

We identify a component of monetary policy news that is extracted from high-frequency changes in risky asset prices. These surprises, which we call "risk shifts", are uncorrelated, and therefore complementary, to risk-free rate surprises. We show that (i) risk shifts capture the lion's share of...

A sizeable literature reports that financial market analysts and forecasters herd for reputational reasons. Using new data from a large survey of professional forecasters' expectations about stock market movements, we find strong evidence that the expected average of all forecasters' forecasts...

The puzzling evidence of seemingly high momentum returns is related to an understanding of risk as a simple covariance. If we consider, however, risk in higher-order statistical moments, momentum returns appear less advantageous. Thus, a prospect-theoretical assessment of US stock momentum...

Using a new data set on investor sentiment we show that institutional and individual sentiment proxy for smart money and noise trader risk, respectively. First, using bias-adjusted long-horizon regressions, we document that institutional sentiment forecasts stock market returns at intermediate...

This paper contributes empirically to our understanding of informed traders. It analyzes traders? characteristics in an electronic limit order market via anonymous trader identities. We use six indicators of informed trading in a cross-sectional multivariate approach to identify traders with...

We examine whether consumer confidence - as a proxy for individual investor sentiment - affects expected stock returns internationally in 18 industrialized countries. In line with recent evidence for the U.S., we find that sentiment negatively forecasts aggregate stock market returns on average...

This paper shows how traders learn from post-trade identity disclosure in a currency limit order market. We establish that identity disclosure reveals information and show how traders react by reversing their order flow in line with the better informed. Informed traders primarily incorporate...

The common perception in the literature is that current dividend yields are uninformative about future dividends, but contain some information about future stock returns. In this paper, we show that this finding reverses when looking at a broad panel of countries outside the U.S.. In particular,...

Based on individual expectations from the Survey of Professional Forecasters, we construct a real-time proxy for expected term premium changes on long-term bonds. We empirically investigate the relation of these bond term premium expectations with expectations about key macroeconomic variables...