What is Rational Inattention

The stock market suffers from money illusion, discounting real cash flows at nominal discount rates. Subsequent research has also shown that the cross-section of stock returns is impacted differently by inflation. This cross-sectional variance across risky and safe stocks makes one of the most puzzling anomalies, risk (beta) anomaly, stronger in inflationary periods. This chapter tests the hypothesis that higher inflation leads to stronger mispricing of risk in stock market due to money illusion effect in Turkey, one of the emerging countries afflicted with perennial high inflation. The results show that although money illusion and mispricing were not visibly present in hyper-inflationary period in 1990s, the anomalous pricing of risky securities was remarkably high in inflationary periods over the last two decades, with a distinct mispricing due to the inflationary pressure that commenced with the COVID-19 pandemic. These varying results across the vastly different inflation regimes can be explained by rational inattention and impact of past experience of inflation on investment behavior.