Investors' Perceptions and Stock Market Outcomes

This book deals with the issue of the determinants of stock market outcomes. Each chapter tries to explain why stock prices change the way they do and to discover a general approach to predict them. They tells a unique story behind the decision-making process of stock market players starting from the general approach and trying to determine if the stock market outcomes affect economic growth in developing and developed countries. The book moves on to discuss oil prices and their effect on the stock market indices. The second part makes use of the event study methodology and discusses the effect of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster on the oil companies around the world, the terrorist attacks on the airline industry in the US, the change of the CEOs on firms traded on the Warsaw Stock Exchange, and finally the dividend announcements of Polish companies on their stock returns. These papers analyze specific events and show how they affect investors of different companies. By going from general to specific, the book sheds light on understanding of the stock market outcomes and investors` perceptions around the world and throughout different industries using different econometric techniques starting from OLS and ARCH, moving on to SVAR and finishing with the event study methodology.