Implied cost of capital investment strategies - evidence from international stock markets

Investors can generate excess returns by implementing trading strategies based on publicly available equity analyst forecasts. This paper captures the information provided by analysts by the implied cost of capital (ICC), the internal rate of return that equates a firm's share price to the present value of analysts' earnings forecasts. We find that U.S. stocks with a high ICC outperform low ICC stocks on average by 6.0% per year. This spread is significant when controlling the investment returns for their risk exposure as proxied by standard pricing models. Further analysis across the world's largest equity markets validates these results

Overconfident Investors, Predictable Returns, and Excessive Trading

The last several decades have witnessed a shift away from a fully rational paradigm of financial markets toward one in which investor behavior is influenced by psychological biases. Two principal factors have contributed to this evolution: a body of evidence showing how psychological bias affects the behavior of economic actors; and an accumulation of evidence that is hard to reconcile with fully rational models of security market trading volumes and returns. In particular, asset markets exhibit trading volumes that are high, with individuals and asset managers trading aggressively, even when such trading results in high risk and low net returns. Moreover, asset prices display patterns of predictability that are difficult to reconcile with rational-expectations–based theories of price formation. In this paper, we discuss the role of overconfidence as an explanation for these patterns

Making Research Data Accessible

This chapter argues that these benefits will accrue more quickly, and will be more significant and more enduring, if researchers make their data “meaningfully accessible.” Data are meaningfully accessible when they can be interpreted and analyzed by scholars far beyond those who generated them. Making data meaningfully accessible requires that scholars take the appropriate steps to prepare their data for sharing, and avail themselves of the increasingly sophisticated infrastructure for publishing and preserving research data. The better other researchers can understand shared data and the more researchers who can access them, the more those data will be re-used for secondary analysis, producing knowledge. Likewise, the richer an understanding an instructor and her students can gain of the shared data being used to teach and learn a particular research method, the more useful those data are for that pedagogical purpose. And the more a scholar who is evaluating the work of another can learn about the evidence that underpins its claims and conclusions, the better their ability to identify problems and biases in data generation and analysis, and the better informed and thus stronger an endorsement of the work they can offer

Impact Metrics

Virtually every evaluative task in the academy involves some sort of metric (Elkana et al. 1978; Espeland & Sauder 2016; Gingras 2016; Hix 2004; Jensenius et al. 2018; Muller 2018; Osterloh and Frey 2015; Todeschini & Baccini 2016; Van Noorden 2010; Wilsdon et al. 2015). One can decry this development, and inveigh against its abuses and its over-use (as many of the foregoing studies do). Yet, without metrics, we would be at pains to render judgments about scholars, published papers, applications (for grants, fellowships, and conferences), journals, academic presses, departments, universities, or subfields. Of course, we also undertake to judge these issues ourselves through a deliberative process that involves reading the work under evaluation. This is the traditional approach of peer review. No one would advocate a system of evaluation that is entirely metric-driven. Even so, reading is time-consuming and inherently subjective; it is, after all, the opinion of one reader (or several readers, if there is a panel of reviewers). It is also impossible to systematically compare these judgments. To be sure, one might also read, and assess, the work of other scholars, but this does not provide a systematic basis for comparison – unless, that is, a standard metric(s) of comparison is employed. Finally, judging scholars through peer review becomes logistically intractable when the task shifts from a single scholar to a large group of scholars or a large body of work, e.g., a journal, a department, a university, a subfield, or a discipline. It is impossible to read, and assess, a library of work

The Woodstruck Deed The Documentation of Accidental Defloration among the Jews of Early Modern Italy

The “woodstruck” (mukat ets) deed, a Hebrew document that officially records the accidental defloration of a young girl, appears in sixteenth-century Italy, in a block of deeds recorded by Jewish notaries in Rome, in a rabbinic responsum and in the record book of the Padua community. Prior to that, there is no record of such an instrument anywhere in Jewish history and literature, despite the fact that the frequency of accidental defloration must have been a constant. Moreover, the registers of the Jewish notaries of sixteenth-century Rome contain over a hundred such deeds for the sixteenth century alone. The appearance of the woodstruck deed seems to reflect the formalization and bureaucratization of Jewish life in the early modern era. An early sign of this development is the creation, in the fourteenth century, of a formal process of ordaining rabbis and granting them communal appointments. The early modern era also witnessed the emergence of new public institutions and the records of their regulations and activities. Henceforth public institutions, principally the Jewish community, intruded into the life of the individual, as details of his personal life and activities came into the public purview, and, theoretically at least, became subject to supervision and intervention. The woodstruck deed thus presents another example of the exposure of certain areas of daily life. This trend has been noted with regard to marriage and death. The woodstruck deed differs in that it represents the seizing of the initiative by the family, as it attempts to exploit the new public involvement in personal life to its advantage. Apart from the institutional context, the woodstruck deed offered parents a guarantee that their daughter’s honor would not be impugned if on her wedding night her husband discovered that she was not a virgin. There was nothing to compel the family to publicize the incident or the document, unless on the morning after the wedding the groom complained that he had not found his wife to be a virgin. The woodstruck deed may imply, therefore, that parents had reason to suspect that their daughter might engage in premarital sex, which could lead to an unwelcome scandal. This presentation is for the following text(s): Pahad Yitzhak (Isaac’s Fear) by Isaac Lampronti Minutes Book of the Council of the Jewish Community of Padua 1577-1603 Responsum 137 of Rabbi Azriel Diena (1528) Shtar mukat \u27etz (Woodstruck Deed) by Judah b. Shabbatai (1544