Search Results
Working Paper
Investor Sentiment and the (Discretionary) Accrual-return Relation
Discretionary accruals are positively associated with stock returns at the aggregate level but negatively so in the cross section. Using Baker-Wurgler investor sentiment index, we find that a significant presence of sentiment-driven investors is important in accounting for both patterns. We document that the aggregate relation is only prominent during periods of high investor sentiment. Similarly, the cross-section relation is considerably stronger in high-sentiment periods in both economic magnitude and statistical significance. We then embed investor sentiment into a stylized model of ...
Journal Article
Banks’ Commercial Real Estate Risks Are Uneven
Investors have been acutely attuned to commercial real estate (CRE) risks recently due to higher interest rates and changes in how Americans work. On the surface, these risks may seem particularly concerning for small and regional banks, which tend to hold large concentrations of loans backed by commercial properties. However, we show that CRE risks can vary substantially across property types and geographic locations, suggesting that aggregate CRE exposure may be a poor measure of risk.
Discussion Paper
Did Investor Sentiment Affect Credit Risk around the 2016 Election?
Immediately following the presidential election of 2016, both consumer and investor sentiments were buoyant and financial markets boomed. That these sentiments affect financial asset prices is not so surprising, given past stock market evidence and episodes such as the dot-com bubble. Perhaps more surprising, the risk of corporate default—which is driven mainly by firms’ financial health but also by bond liquidity—also fell following the election, as indicated by lower yield spreads. In this post, I show that, although expectations of better corporate and macroeconomic conditions were ...
Working Paper
Where the Wild Things Are: Measuring Systemic Risk through Investor Sentiment
In this paper, I develop a systemic risk measure derived from investor sentiment that has predictive power over future economic activity and market returns. Unlike existing measures, it is not focused on flagging investors? heightened awareness of risk at the end of a boom episode but rather on capturing shifts in their trading behavior at the beginning of the episode. The method allows investors and regulators to observe industries in which risks could be building and provides regulators some lead time in deploying their macroprudential tools.
Working Paper
Innovation, investor sentiment, and firm-level experimentation
Due to frictions like informational externalities, firms invest too little in learning the productivity of newly available technologies through small-scale experimentation. I study the effect of investor sentiment on the relation between technological innovation and future firm-level R&D expenses, which include the resources used for small-scale experimentation. I find that rapidly improving investor sentiment strengthens the effect of technological innovation on one-year-ahead R&D expenses, and that the effect is more pronounced for high-tech firms with tighter financing constraints. The ...