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This study investigates the impact of investor sentiment on excess equity return forecasting. A high (low) investor sentiment may weaken the connection between fundamental economic (behavioral-based nonfundamental) predictors and market returns. We find that although fundamental variables can be strong predictors when sentiment is low, they tend to lose their predictive power when investor sentiment is high. Nonfundamental predictors perform well during high-sentiment periods while their predictive ability deteriorates when investor sentiment is low. These paradigm shifts in equity return forecasting provide a key to understanding and resolving the lack of predictive power for both fundamental and nonfundamental variables debated in recent studies. This paper was accepted by David Simchi-Levi, finance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By developing a continuous-time heterogeneous agent financial market model of multi-assets traded by fundamental and momentum investors, we provide a potential mechanism for generating time-varying dominance between fundamental and non-fundamental in financial markets. We show that investment constraints lead to the coexistence of a locally stable fundamental steady state and a locally stable limit cycle around the fundamental, characterized by a Bautin bifurcation. This provides a mechanism for market prices to switch stochastically between the two persistent but very different market states, leading to the coexistence and time-varying dominance of seemingly controversial efficient market and price momentum over different time periods. The model also generates other financial market stylized facts, such as spillover effects in both momentum and volatility, market booms, crashes, and correlation reduction due to cross-sectional momentum trading. Empirical evidence based on the U.S. market supports the main findings. The mechanism developed in this paper can be used to characterize time-varying economic dominance in economics and finance in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For a firm financed by a mixture of collateralized (short-term) debt and uncollateralized (long-term) debt, we show that fluctuations in margin requirements, reflecting funding liquidity shocks, lead to increasing the firm’s default risk and credit spreads. The severity with which a firm is hit by increasing margin requirements highly depends on both its financing structure and debt maturity structure. Our results imply that an additional premium should be added when evaluating debt in order to account for rollover risks, especially for short-matured bonds. In terms of policy implications, our results strongly indicate that regulators should intervene fast to curtail margins in crisis periods and maintain a reasonably low margin level in order to effectively prevent creditors’ run on debt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By incorporating behavioural sentiment in a model of a limit order market, we show that behavioural sentiment not only helps to replicate most of the stylized facts in limit order markets simultaneously, but it also plays a unique role in explaining those stylized facts that cannot be explained by noise trading, such as fat tails in the return distribution, long memory in the trading volume, an increasing and non-linear relationship between trade imbalance and mid-price returns, as well as the diagonal effect, or event clustering, in order submission types. The results show that behavioural sentiment is an important driving force behind many of the well-documented stylized facts in limit order markets. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]