Losing sight of the trees for the forest? Attention allocation and anomalies

Abstract

This paper tests asset pricing implications of the investor attention shift hypothesis proposed in theoretical work. We create a novel proxy for the dynamics of inattention towards firm-specific information and explore its impact on prominent return anomalies. As hypothesized and with all else equal, the proxy positively predicts the post-earnings announcement drift as well as the profitability of pairs trading, and negatively predicts the success of momentum strategies. Taken together, our findings highlight the importance of time-varying investor attention allocation for the price discovery process.