Macroeconomics Forecasts and Microeconomic Forecasters

In the presence of principal-agent problems, published macroeconomic forecasts by professional economists may not measure expectations. Forecasters may use their forecasts in order to manipulate beliefs about their ability. I test a cross-sectional implication of models of reputation and information-revelation. I find that as forecasters become older and more established, they produce more radical forecasts. Since these more radical forecasts are in general less accurate, ex post forecast accuracy grows significantly worse as forecasters become older and more established. These findings indicate that reputational factors are at work in professional macroeconomic forecasts.

Do "Shortages" Cause Inflation?

I count the number of times per month that the word `shortage' appears on the front page of The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times for the period 1969-1994. Using this as a general measure of shortages in the US economy, I test whether shortages help predict inflation. Using a variety of different specifications, I find that this time-series measure of shortages strongly predicts inflation, and contains information not captured by commodity prices, monetary aggregates, interest rates, and other proposed predictors of inflation. This suggests that disequilibrium was an important part of the adjustment of prices to macroeconomic shocks during this period.

Earnings and Expected Returns

The aggregate dividend payout ratio forecasts aggregate excess returns on both stocks and corporate bonds in post-war US data. Both high corporate profits and high stock prices forecast low excess returns on equities. When the payout ratio is high, expected returns are high. The payout ratio's correlation with business conditions gives it predictive power for returns; it contains information about future stock and bond returns that is not captured by other variables. The payout ratio is useful because it captures the temporary components of earnings. The dynamic relationship between dividends, earnings and stock prices shows that a positive innovation in earnings lowers expected returns in the near future, but raises them thereafter.

Does Diversification Destroy Value? Evidence From Industry Shocks

Does corporate diversification reduce shareholder value? Since firms endogenously choose to diversify, exogenous variation in diversification is necessary in order to draw inferences about the causal effect. We examine changes in the within-firm dispersion of industry investment, or diversity.' We find that exogenous changes in diversity, due to changes in industry investment, are negatively related to firm value. Thus diversification destroys value, consistent with the inefficient internal capital markets hypothesis. This finding is not caused by measurement error. We also find that exogenous changes in industry cash flow diversity are negative related to firm value.

Relative Price Variability and Inflation: Evidence from US Cities

We test whether the time-series positive correlation of inflation and intermarket relative price variability is also present in a cross-section of US cities. We find this correlation to be a robust empirical regularity: cities which have higher than average inflation also have higher than average relative price dispersion, ceteris paribus. This result holds for different periods of time, different classes of goods, and across different time horizons. Our results suggest that at least part of the relationship between inflation and relative price variability cannot be explained by monetary factors.

The Diversification Discount: Cash Flows vs. Returns

Diversified firms have different values than comparable portfolios of single-segment firms. These value differences must be due to differences in either future cash flows or future returns. Expected security returns on diversified firms vary systematically with relative value. Discount firms have significantly higher subsequent returns than premium firms. Slightly more than half of the cross-sectional variation in excess values is due to variation in expected future cash flows, with the remainder due to variation in expected future returns and to covariation between cash flow and returns.

The Earnings Announcement Premium and Trading Volume

On average, stock prices rise around scheduled earnings announcement dates. We show that this earnings announcement premium is large, robust, and strongly related to the fact that volume surges around announcement dates. Stocks with high past announcement period volume earn the highest announcement premium, suggesting some common underlying cause for both volume and the premium. We show that high premium stocks experience the highest levels of imputed small investor buying, suggesting that the premium is driven by buying by small investors when the announcement catches their attention.

Dumb Money: Mutual Fund Flows and the Cross-Section of Stock Returns

We use mutual fund flows as a measure for individual investor sentiment for different stocks, and find that high sentiment predicts low future returns at long horizons. Fund flows are dumb money %uF818 by reallocating across different mutual funds, retail investors reduce their wealth in the long run. This dumb money effect is strongly related to the value effect. High sentiment also is associated high corporate issuance, interpretable as companies increasing the supply of shares in response to investor demand.

Investor Sentiment and Corporate Finance: Micro and Macro

We document that net equity issuance is considerably more sensitive to aggregate stock returns and Q's than to firm-level stock returns and Q's. Very similar patterns also emerge when we look at merger activity. In light of earlier work (Campbell 1991, Vuolteenaho 2002) which finds that aggregate stock returns are less informative about future cashflows than are firm-level stock returns--and thus, potentially more strongly influenced by investor sentiment--these results suggest that both equity issuance and mergers are to a significant extent driven by market-timing considerations, as opposed to by purely fundamental factors.

Aggregate Short Interest and Market Valuations

We examine some basic data on the evolution of aggregate short interest, both during the dot-com era, and at other times in history. Total short interest moves in a countercyclical fashion. For example, short interest in NASDAQ stocks actually declines as the NASDAQ index approaches its peak. Moreover, this decline does not seem to reflect a substitution away from outright short-selling and towards put options, as the ratio of put-to-call volume displays the same countercyclical tendency. The evidence suggests that: i) arbitrageurs are reluctant to bet against aggregate mispricings; and ii) short-selling does not play a particularly helpful role in stabilizing the overall stock market.