Target price forecasts: The roles of the 52-week high price and recent investor sentiment

This paper reveals that in addition to fundamental factors, the 52-week high price and recent investor sentiment play an important role in analysts’ target price formation. Analysts’ forecasts of short-term earnings and long-term earnings growth are shown to be important explanatory variables for target prices; equally, the 52-week high price and recent investor sentiment are also shown to explain target price levels and especially target price biases. Our analysis additionally reveals that analysts place greater weight on these two non-fundamental factors in settings with greater task complexity and to some extent in those with greater resource constraints. Conversely, on balance, the results suggest that this increased reliance does not translate into an increased impact per unit of each non-fundamental factor on forecast bias. Finally, our results show that target prices are useful in predicting future stock returns beyond earnings forecasts and commonly used risk proxies. However, in an internally consistent fashion, the informativeness of target prices for future returns is significantly reduced when greater weight is placed on either the 52-week high or recent investor sentiment in the target price formation process.     

Targeted information and limited attention

We examine the implications of limited consumer attention for the targeting decisions of competing firms. Limited attention alters the strategic role of information provision as firms may become incentivized to behave as mass advertisers, despite perfect targeting abilities. We analyze the consequences of limited attention for targeting, strategic pricing, market shares, attention competition between firms, and the value of marketing data to firms. Accounting for limited attention in an otherwise standard targeting framework can explain several recent key issues from the advertising industry, such as consumer-side information overload or the increased usage of ad blocking tools.     

RENOVATIO MONETAE: WHEN GESELL TAXES WORKED

Gesell taxes on money have recently received attention as a way of alleviating the zero lower bound on interest rates. Less known is that such taxes generated seigniorage in medieval Europe for around two centuries. When a Gesell tax was levied, current coins ceased to be legal and had to be exchanged into new coins for a fee. Using a cash-in-advance model, we analyze under what conditions agents exchange coins and the tax generates revenues. A low exchange fee, high punishments for using old coins, and a long time period between re-mintings induce people to use new coins.     

DOES BIG GOVERNMENT HURT GROWTH LESS IN HIGH‐TRUST COUNTRIES?

Social trust is linked to both public sector size and to economic growth, thereby helping to explain how some countries combine high taxes with high levels of economic growth. This paper examines if social trust insulates countries against the negative effects of public sector size on growth, documented in several studies. We note that the effect is theoretically ambiguous. In panel data from 66 countries across 40 years, we find no robust evidence of insulation effects: when excluding countries with uncertain trust scores, our results suggest that big government hurts growth also in high‐trust countries, and that the mechanism is by lowering private investments. (JEL H10, O11, P16, Z10)     

More on parametric characterizations of risk aversion and prudence

Summary. This note provides an alternative proof for the equivalence of decreasing absolute prudence (DAP) in the expected utility framework and in a two-parametric approach where utility is a function of the mean and the standard deviation. In addition, we elucidate that the equivalence of DAP and the concavity of utility as a function of mean and variance, which was shown to hold for normally distributed stochastics in Lajeri and Nielsen [4], cannot be generalized. Received: November 27, 2000; revised version: November 26, 2001 Correspondence to: T. Eichner     

Die Berücksichtigung klimatisch bedingter Veränderungen der Sturmaktivität in den Entscheidungs-prozessen deutscher Erstversicherer

Climate Change will lead to an increased number and intensity of severe winterstorms in Northwest-Europe and Germany. Along with this development comes a rise in potential claims; insurers are particularly affected in the storm and tempest insurance, the homeowner’s and householder’s comprehensive insurance and the motor hull insurance. Although, the predictions of storm changes refer to the next 50 or 100 years a consideration of the expected changes in today’s decissions is recommended. Several measures are already helpful in reaching the insurers’ goals and should therefore be realised soon.     

Are Interventions Self Exciting?

The time pattern of official interventions on the foreign exchange market exhibits periods of intense activity followed by long spells of inaction. In this paper, we examine whether the time interval between successive intervention matters for future interventions. To capture the properties of intervention duration an ACD model is used. The data are daily observations of interventions by the Federal Reserve, the Bundesbank and the Swiss National Bank. The evidence finds that the intervention duration is highly persistent and that the hazard is time dependent.