This study examines the effect of option volume relative to stock volume (O/S) on market response to earnings surprises. The market reaction per unit of earnings surprise is lower for firms that have high O/S prior to earnings announcement than for firms with low O/S prior to earnings...

This paper hypothesizes that if an earnings announcement fails to resolve uncertainty about the firm’s future outcomes, then management will take steps to further inform investors. The novelty of our approach consists of our empirical proxy for unresolved uncertainty, constructed using a...

This study explores whether the Management Discussion and Analysis (MD&A) section of Form 10-Q and 10-K has incremental information content beyond financial measures such as earnings surprises, accruals and operating cash flows (OCF). It uses a well-established classification scheme of words...

Trading outside the main session occurs between 4:00PM-8:00PM and 4:00AM-9:30AM and is typically dominated by institutional investors, as retail investors are discouraged to trade in the extended trading hours. This study examines whether trading in the extended hours is predictive of future...

We examine gender differences in the language of CFOs that participate in quarterly earnings calls. Female executives are more concise, less optimistic, are clearer, use fewer idioms or clichés, and provide more numbers in their speech. These differences are particularly strong in the more...

We examine how insider trading affects market responses to subsequent analyst forecast revisions in a global setting. We find stronger market responses to analyst forecast revisions subsequent to the insider trading than to other revisions. This stronger response is mainly driven by analyst...

The Post-Earnings Announcement Drift (PEAD) anomaly refers to the tendency of stock prices to continue drifting in the same direction as earnings surprises well through the subsequent earnings announcements; ignoring the autocorrelations in extreme earnings surprises across adjacent quarters....

A vast literature has documented an optimistic bias of U.S. analysts. This study compares the optimistic bias of U.S. analysts to that of foreign analysts. Using the implied rate of return in target prices, i.e., the ratio of the target price to the stock price one day before the target price...

Theory suggests that relatively inefficient firms should have lower and more uncertain future cash flows, which should lead to lower current equity values and higher future equity returns. However, the literature provides contradictory evidence on the relationship between operational efficiency...

We analyze the effects of partisan Congressional control on the US economy. We find that economic performance is weaker when no party has the majority in both chambers of Congress (divided Congress). This weaker economic performance is caused by reduced and less effective regulation during...