Score contribution per author:
α: calibrated so average coauthorship-adjusted count equals average raw count
To reconcile the disconnect between survey expectations of stock returns and rational expectations, researchers have hypothesized that survey participants may confound beliefs and preferences by (i) reporting risk-neutral forecasts of future returns; or (ii) reporting pessimistically-tilted forecasts reflecting ambiguity aversion or robustness concerns. We find that these hypotheses are strongly rejected by the data, albeit for different reasons: Inconsistent with hypothesis (i), survey return forecasts are reliably much higher than risk-free interest rates and survey expected excess returns are predictably time-varying. Inconsistent with (ii), agents are not always pessimistic about future returns, but often predictably optimistic and unconditionally unbiased.