Periods Of High Investor Sentiment Research Articles

Interaction between investor sentiment, limits to arbitrage and the returns of stock market anomalies: evidence from the UK stock market

This study investigates the role of two prominent concepts in finance: limits to arbitrage and investor sentiment in stock prices. The study examines how changes in market-wide investor sentiment and limits to arbitrage can affect the performance of nine UK stock market anomalies. The extant literature relating to investor sentiment focuses mainly on the US stock market, whilst research on the UK market typically examines aggregated index-level data. In addition, previous studies have focused on examining investor sentiment and limits to arbitrage separately. Using data from UK-listed companies over the period January 1997 to December 2019, the study finds that five stock market anomalies were related to changes in UK investor sentiment and produced significantly higher returns following periods of high investor sentiment, while the effect of limits to arbitrage was mostly limited. However, the interaction analysis provided support to the limits to arbitrage theory and demonstrated that the effect of high investor sentiment on stock market anomalies was more pronounced when combined with high limits to arbitrage and had less effect during periods characterised by low limits to arbitrage.

CEO overconfidence and investor sentiment in M&A decisions

This study investigates the interactive impact of CEO overconfidence and investor sentiment on merger behavior in U.S. firms. We find that the influence of CEO overconfidence on merger frequency is stronger during periods of high investor sentiment, diminishing in low sentiment times. It suggests that investor sentiment is a more dominant determinant than CEO overconfidence in shaping merger frequency. Furthermore, a bullish market trend motivates overconfident CEOs to pursue diversifying mergers, while a bearish market trend encourages cash payments. Overall, overconfident CEOs adapt their merger behavior based on the economic environment, with investor sentiment playing a dominant role in decision-making.

The alphabet and idiosyncratic volatility

AbstractWe find that stocks with names earlier in an alphabetic ordering exhibit greater idiosyncratic volatility. Stocks whose names are in the first 5% of an alphabetic ordering have 4.5% higher idiosyncratic volatility relative to other stocks. To address potential concerns about early‐alphabet firms being different, we study name changes. Idiosyncratic volatility is 7% higher when a name change causes a stock to move into the first 5%. We attribute these results to noise traders being more active in early‐alphabet stocks because of heuristic‐based investing. In support of this explanation, we find that the effect is strongest during periods of high investor sentiment and among stocks with high turnover. Our results provide evidence that noise traders contribute to the idiosyncratic volatility of stocks.

Uncovering Financial Constraints

Abstract We use a random forest model to classify firms’ financial constraints using only financial variables. Our methodology expands the range of classified firms compared to text-based measures while maintaining similar levels of informativeness. We construct two versions of our constraint measures, one using many firm characteristics and the other using a small set of more primitive characteristics. Using our measures, we find that institutional investors hold a lower percentage of shares in equity-focused constrained firms, while retail investors show a preference for them. Equity issuance and investment of constrained firms also increases during periods of high investor sentiment.

How economic uncertainty influences the performance of investor perceptions and behavior

In the presence of high uncertainty and asymmetric information, firms might opportunistically shift earnings from uncertain to more certain times. Thus, this paper examines how investor perceptions and risk-taking behavior fluctuate under high economic uncertainty and how earnings quality influences stock return synchronicity and analyst forecast accuracy during periods of high uncertainty. Using a large sample obtained from 24 countries worldwide over the period from 1997 to 2017, we find that investors take a bearish attitude and stocks are more synchronized during years with high economic uncertainty. Furthermore, we find a negative association between analyst forecast accuracy and economic uncertainty. Second, a low level of investor protection indicates a low level of market sentiment. Third, stocks become more synchronous and analyst forecasts are more accurate during periods of high investor sentiment and in the presence of higher levels of earnings quality. Fourth, higher stock return synchronicity implies greater analyst forecast accuracy. Overall, we show that all these effects are more intense during periods of high economic uncertainty.

Sentiment and Style: Evidence from Republican Managers

This study examines the relationship between corporate managers’ political ideology and corporate leverage policies conditional on investor sentiment. Based on a minimum of 21,884 observations over the 1992–2008 period, the authors show that Republican managers significantly reduce leverage during periods of high investor sentiment. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to document that Republican managers are not swayed by the general tendency to increase leverage in high-sentiment periods. Overall, the empirical evidence from this study indicates that personal characteristics of managers have a consistent impact on corporate policies, providing support for the “behavioral consistency” theory. Further, the results of this study imply that internal and external stakeholders of a corporation should take into account manager personality in their decisions. For example, the board of a highly indebted company may consider hiring a conservative manager to reduce its financial risk.

Do the Securities Analysts Play the Role of Information Competition or Information Supplement? Empirical Analysis Based on Investor Sentiment

The purpose of this article is to investigate the role of securities analysts in Chinese stock market. Taking the earnings announcements of listed companies, analysts’ earnings forecast and analysts’ recommendations in Chinese stock markets from 2014 to 2018 as the samples, this paper explores the influence mechanism of investor sentiment on the market reaction to announcements, and investigates the influence mechanism of investor sentiment on the role of securities analysts under the framework of behavioral finance theory. On the basis of theoretical analysis, this paper empirically tests the relationship between the information content of analysts’ reports and the information content of the earnings announcements from the perspective of behavioral finance, and discusses the role of securities analysts in the stock market. The results show that during the periods of high investor sentiment, securities analysts do not demonstrate the role of information competition or information supplement. On the other hand, during the periods of low investor sentiment, securities analysts play the role of information competition or information supplement. Furthermore, after excluding the investor sentiment component of the market reaction to announcements, securities analysts do not demonstrate the role of information competition, but play the role of information supplement. The findings of this study offer new insights into the role securities analysts play in Chinese stock market, which is conducive to improving the quality of analysts’ reports, thus enhancing the efficiency of the securities market.

Democracy and the pricing of initial public offerings around the world

We find a negative relation between democracy and initial public offering (IPO) underpricing for a sample of 23,050 IPOs across 45 countries. The effect of democracy on underpricing is weaker for IPOs audited by Big 4 auditing firms, backed by venture capital firms, and with better disclosure specificity of use of proceeds. Democracy exerts a larger influence on underpricing for firms with higher agency problems, in countries with weaker institutional quality or shareholder protection, and during periods of high investor sentiment or economic policy uncertainty. Overall, our results highlight the importance of democracy in reducing IPO underpricing around the world.

The Value of Investor Sophistication

We propose idiosyncratic volatility based return spread as a new measure of the stock-level value of investor sophistication. We find that stocks with a high value of investor sophistication tend to have low average returns, and this effect is pronounced for highly short-sale constrained stocks. The negative relation between expected stock returns and the value of investor sophistication is not explained by variables that affect the relation between idiosyncratic volatility and returns. Our results are robust with respect to whether idiosyncratic volatility is estimated using different factor models or methods. Such relation is more prominent in periods of high investor sentiment, high market uncertainty, and economic contraction.

Does investor sentiment affect bank stability? International evidence from lending behavior

We study the impact of investor sentiment on bank credit and how changes in lending may affect bank stability. We analyze a sample of 2,673 banks from 127 developed and developing countries during the 1997–2016 period. Our results indicate that periods of high investor sentiment positively affect bank lending and encourage bank risk-taking through the increase in the amount of loans granted which, in fact, reduces bank stability. We find that the impact of investor sentiment on bank stability through changes in growth in bank loans is less negative in countries where creditor rights protection is greater, in terms of both collateral and bankruptcy. During systemic banking crises, the negative effect on bank stability was weaker since any increase in bank credit supply provoked by investor sentiment was counteracted by the crisis.

The Effect of Investor Sentiment on Nonprofit Donations

Prior work shows that capital market participants including investors, analysts, and managers are all impacted by the prevailing level of investor sentiment. We extend this line of work by investigating whether the effects of sentiment spill over into the nonprofit sector by affecting donors’ spending to support moral causes. While donors are driven by ethical, altruistic, and other utility-maximizing motives, it is unclear whether behavioral biases stemming from sentiment would influence donors’ decisions to give. We shed light on this issue using a large industry-diverse panel of over 115 thousand organization-years from 2008 to 2016. Results indicate that nonprofit organizations receive less in stock-based donations and more in cash-based donations during periods of high investor sentiment. Our inquiry separately considers cash and stock-based donations because we expect, and find, that market-related sentiment impacts these types of contributions differently. Moreover, we find that these effects are stronger for organizations with large donors, who are more closely tied to the capital markets, and therefore more susceptible to investor sentiment, as well as charitable organizations, consistent with “tug-at-the-heartstrings” type appeals inducing more emotional donation response. Taken together, the results suggest that market-wide investor sentiment impacts nonprofit organizations and the effects vary in the cross-section.

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 earnings management, and illustrate that a positive (negative) relationship between stock returns and earnings management can endogenously emerge in the aggregate (cross section). Our analysis suggests that the (discretionary) accrual-return relation at both the aggregate and firm levels at least partially reflects mispricing that is related to market-wide investor sentiment.

Investment momentum: A two‐dimensional behavioural strategy

AbstractWe propose an investment‐momentum strategy of buying past winners with low investment and selling past losers with high investment, which simultaneously exploits two dimensions of market inefficiencies. The new strategy generates twice the monthly returns earned by either the price momentum or investment strategy (1.44% vs. 0.75% or 0.61%). Despite the diminishing anomalies in recent decades, the investment‐momentum stays persistent. The mispricing‐based strategy performs better in periods of high investor sentiment or for stocks with high limits‐to‐arbitrage, which is consistent with our expectations. Overall, we show that one can simultaneously use multiple dimensions of market inefficiency to attain superior performance.

Investor sentiment and the pre-FOMC announcement drift

We find that the stock market increases significantly over the pre-FOMC announcement window only during periods of high investor sentiment and low economic policy uncertainty. Buy-initiated trades associated with high sentiment are positively related to pre-FOMC returns. These findings are consistent with a behavioural interpretation of the pre-FOMC announcement drift.

The effect of investor sentiment on market reactions to financial earnings restatements: Lessons from the United States

The aim of the present research is to investigate the moderating impact of investor sentiment on the effect of earnings restatements on market valuation for a securities sample from the US stock market. Using an econometric approach based on event study methodology and multivariate regression models after taking into account macroeconomic factors, firm characteristics and size of earnings restatements, our empirical results reveal that one-standard deviation increase in investor sentiment increases cumulative abnormal return (CAR) by about 0.56%. In addition, our findings clearly indicate that during periods of high investor sentiment the US market reacts more favorably to adverse earnings restatement events. This suggests that investor conservatism represents a dominant factor to explain the positive relationship between CAR and investor sentiment. Over the 2002 to 2017 time period, we employed investor sentiment measure and accounting data. The main implication of these findings is to improve understanding of how investors’ behavioral characteristics affect the transmission mechanism of information in money market and capital market prices.

Mutual Funds and Mispriced Stocks

We propose a new measure of fund investment skill, active fund overpricing (AFO), encapsulating the fund’s active share of investments, the direction of fund active bets with regard to mispriced stocks, and the dispersion of mispriced stocks in the fund’s investment opportunity set. We find that fund activeness is not sufficient for outperformance: high (low) AFO funds taking active bets on the wrong (right) side of stock mispricing achieve inferior (superior) fund performance. However, high AFO funds receive higher flows during periods of high investor sentiment, when the performance–flow relation becomes weaker. This paper was accepted by Karl Diether, finance.

Aggregate investor sentiment and stock return synchronicity

Abstract We show that the returns of individual stocks become more synchronous with the aggregate market during periods of high investor sentiment. We also document that the effect of sentiment on stock return synchronicity is especially pronounced for small, young, volatile, non-dividend-paying and low-priced stocks. This ‘difference in difference’ suggests that stocks with these characteristics are affected more by sentiment—consistent with previous studies. Our results support the hypothesis that greater constraints on arbitrage and the prevalence of sentiment-driven demand during periods of high sentiment lead to increased comovement among stocks.

Short interest, stock returns and credit ratings

Abstract This paper investigates the role of credit risk in the relationship between short-selling activity and future stock returns. We find that the predictive power of short interest for future returns is concentrated in the worst-rated stocks. Low-grade stocks with the largest short interest decrease outperform those with the largest short interest increase by 1.09 percent in the following month. This return spread is robust to controls for cross-sectional effects and firm characteristics, and is much more pronounced during periods of high investor sentiment and low liquidity. Distressed firms with large short interest increases experience a worse performance subsequently.

Pension discount rate and investor sentiment

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine how investor sentiment, proxied by Michigan consumer confidence index, affects the choice of defined benefit pension plan discount rates.Design/methodology/approachThe authors use multivariate analysis to test our hypotheses. The dependent variable is defined pension plan discount rate and the testing variables are investor sentiment and a dummy variable representing underfunded status.FindingsThe authors find a negative and significant relation between investor sentiment and pension plan discount rate. During high (low) sentiment periods, pension discount rate tends to be adjusted downward (upward) discretionarily. Further analysis indicates the relationship between pension discount rate and investor sentiment is more pronounced for firms with underfunded pension plans. The results can be explained by limited attention effects, capital budgeting strategy and earning smoothing.Practical implicationsThe empirical results of this study have important implications for corporate governance and regulation. Specifically, the results suggest the need for increased attention from boards of directors, auditors and regulators to reported pension liabilities, especially during periods of high investor sentiment when pension plan sponsors are more likely to adjust down pension discount rate and accordingly to increase pension liabilities.Originality/valueThe paper contributes to the extant literature by identifying investor sentiment as a new incentive of pension discount rate manipulation. The empirical results of this study also have important implications for corporate governance and regulation.

Investment-Momentum: A Two-Dimensional Behavioral Strategy

We propose an investment-momentum strategy of buying past winners with low investment and selling past losers with high investment, which exploits simultaneously two dimensions of market inefficiencies. The new strategy generates twice the monthly returns earned by either the price momentum or investment strategy (1.44% vs. 0.75% or 0.61%) for 1965-2015. Despite of the diminishing anomalies in recent decades, the investment-momentum stays persistent. The mispricing-based strategy performs better in periods of high investor sentiment or for stocks with high limits-to-arbitrage, which is consistent with our expectation. Overall, we show that, in addition to “fundamentals” enhanced momentum strategies, one can simultaneously condition on multi-dimension of inefficiencies to attain superior performance.