Far away from home: Investors’ underreaction to geographically dispersed information

Zilin Chen, Liya Chu, Dawei Liang and Jun Tu

Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, 2022, vol. 136, issue C

Abstract: Using a novel data set to identify geographic peer firms based on the locations of both firms’ headquarters and material subsidiaries, we show that returns on geographical peers have strong predictive power for focal firm returns. A value-weighted long-short strategy that buys stocks with the highest geo-peer returns and shorts stocks with the lowest geo-peer returns generates a Fama and French(2015) five-factor alpha of 0.6% per month. This strategy is distinct from other cross-firm momentum strategies and cannot be explained by local economic conditions. The effect is more pronounced among firms that receive less investor attention and that are more costly to arbitrage, consistent with slow information diffusion in the geographic network into stock prices.

Keywords: Geographic peers; Limited attention; Material subsidiaries; Return predictability; Slow information diffusion (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G10 G11 G14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165188922000306
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:dyncon:v:136:y:2022:i:c:s0165188922000306

DOI: 10.1016/j.jedc.2022.104325

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control is currently edited by J. Bullard, C. Chiarella, H. Dawid, C. H. Hommes, P. Klein and C. Otrok

More articles in Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().