Positive Thinking about the Future Predicts Stock Price Crash Risk: Evidence from U.S. Major Stock Exchanges, 1994-2015

I propose ‘positive thinking about the future’ (Sevincer et al., 2014) of corporate elites is associated with higher stock price crash risk. I merged three domains of ‘big data’ sources to test this hypothesis. The results are consistent across alternative measures of crash risk and the reverse causality is unlikely.