Abstract:
Baker and Wurgler [2007] take a “top down” approach to behavioral finance and the stock market. Investor sentiment is taken to be exogenous and the focus is on its empirical effects. Sentiment is measurable and its waves have clearly discernible, important, and regular effects on firms and the overall stock market. Stocks that are hardest to arbitrage or value are most affected by sentiment.
123—Massa and Yadav [2012]
S
ever, as it applies to stock returns and
mutual fund behavior. The traditional finance paradigm seeks to understand financial mar- kets using models based on the law of one price, where agents are fully rational. When new information is received, agents cor- rectly update their beliefs, applying Bayesian learning. With these beliefs, agent choices are normatively acceptable and consistent with subjective expected utility. The problem with this paradigm is that its predictions are often not confirmed in the data.
entiment is something we are familiar with and intuitively understand. It is quite different to understand, how-