Mutual funds hold 32% of the U.S. equity market and comprise 58% of retirement savings, yet retail investors consistently make poor choices when selecting funds. Theory suggests that poor choices are partially due to mutual fund managers creating unnecessarily complex disclosures and fee...

Individual investors often neglect value-relevant accounting information and instead underperform by trading on technical trends. We investigate the frictions that impede individual investors' use of accounting information, and in particular their costs of monitoring and acquiring accounting...

In 2014, the Associated Press (AP) began using algorithms to write articles about firms' earnings announcements. These “robo-journalism” articles synthesize information from firms' press releases, analyst reports, and stock performance and are widely disseminated by major news outlets a few...

This Internet Appendix includes supplementary discussion and analyses. The original paper "Capital Market Effects of Media Synthesis and Dissemination: Evidence from Robo-Journalism" is available at the following URL: 'http://ssrn.com/abstract=2872784' http://ssrn.com/abstract=2872784

We use the 529 college savings plan setting to investigate whether and why households make suboptimal choices to invest in local assets. We estimate that 67% of open accounts between 2010 and 2020 were located suboptimally due to the plans' tax inefficiencies and high expenses. Over the...

Using a unique dataset of internet research on business media sites matched to the identities of investors, we argue that broadly available media content can help sophisticated investors generate private information. Prior work finds that adverse selection increases at earnings announcements...

This study empirically investigates two effects of alternative data availability: stock price informativeness and its disciplining effect on managers' actions. Recent computing advancements have enabled technology companies to collect real-time, granular indicators of fundamentals to sell to...

Corporate governance experts pay considerable attention to the composition of the full board of directors. And yet, much of the substantive work of the board is carried out by committee.While the nominating and governance committee, in consultation with the chairman or lead independent director,...

While the shareholder benefits of investor conferences are well-documented, evidence on whether these conferences facilitate managerial opportunism is scarce. In this paper, we examine whether managers opportunistically exploit heightened attention around the conference to “hype” the stock....