Technology Hype in Financial Markets
Prof. Arman Eshraghi
Professor of Finance and Investment, Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University
Date: 20 March 2025 (Thursday)
Time: 10:00 – 11:30
Venue: E22-G008
Host: Prof. Jason XIAO, Professor in Accounting
Abstract
We examine how investors react when firms disclose hyped emerging technologies. In a novel US setting, we match technologies disclosed in 8-K filings with corresponding stages of the widely used Gartner Hype Cycle. Findings show strong robust evidence for ‘technology hype’: investor short-term reactions are significantly positive – particularly to technologies at their peak of inflated expectations – but reverse later due to insider selling and firms overselling the hype. Overhyped firms also have a higher stock price crash risk. Firms with low analyst coverage, high retail ownership and information asymmetry, and those outside Nasdaq and the Silicon Valley experience stronger abnormal returns, consistent with investors searching for ‘hidden gems’.
Speaker
Arman Eshraghi holds the Chair of Finance and Investment at Cardiff Business School, UK. His academic research spans finance, accounting and management with interests including behavioural/corporate/sustainable finance and financial technology. His work is published in some leading journals of the field and cited widely including in the Financial Times, Washington Post, Forbes, Bloomberg, BBC, Euronews and Harvard Business Review. Prof. Eshraghi is Editor-in-Chief of International Review of Economics and Finance, Senior Editor of Finance Research Letters and Global Finance Journal, and currently guest-editing for the European Journal of Finance. His has served as Shimomura Fellow at the Development Bank of Japan, Erskine Fellow at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, visiting fellow at University College London and Advisory Board Member at Fintech Wales. He chairs the professorial committee of the British Accounting and Finance Association and leads the Cardiff Fintech Research Group as well as the Behavioural Finance Working Group in London.
All are welcome!
