Losing Sight of the Trees for the Forest? Attention Allocation and Anomalies

This paper tests asset pricing implications of the investor attention shift hypothesis proposed in recent theoretical work. We create a novel proxy for the dynamics of inattention towards firm-specific information and explore its impact on prominent return anomalies. As hypothesized and with all else equal, the proxy positively predicts the post-earnings-announcement drift and negatively predicts the success of momentum strategies. Moreover, it has explanatory power for the profitability of pairs trading, a promising yet widely neglected setting concerned with the relative pricing efficiency of economically linked stocks. Taken together, our findings highlight the importance of time-varying investor attention allocation