This paper studies the relation between the media coverage of funds and their future performance. We classify news items about equity hedge funds over 1999--2008 into three source groups: General newspapers, Specialized magazines, and Corporate Communication. Examining post-exclusive-coverage...

This paper introduces a measure of fund-flow impact, based on a fund's contemporaneous return-flow relation, and demonstrates that the smart-money phenomenon predominantly stems from high-flow-impact funds. A smarter-money strategy, one that concentrates in high-flow-impact funds, fares...

Using a parsimonious measure of investor protection constructed from fund organizational characteristics, this paper documents that companies targeted by activists with better investor protection structures outperform those targeted by poor-investor-protection activists by roughly 10% per year....

We consider a firm's competitiveness based on the manner by which other firms mention it on their 10-K filings. Using all public firm filings simultaneously, we implement a PageRank-type algorithm to produce a dynamic measure of firm competitiveness, denoted C-Rank. A high-minus-low C-Rank...

This paper investigate the effects of investor protection on hedge fund activism. Using a parsimonious measure of investor protection constructed from fund organizational characteristics, we document that higher investor protection is strongly correlated with superior performance of activists....

We develop real-time proxies of retail corporate sales from multiple sources, including ~50 million mobile devices. These measures contain information from both the earnings quarter (“within quarter”) and the period between that quarter's end and the earnings announcement date (“post...

We develop real-time proxies of retail corporate sales from multiple sources, including ~50 million mobile devices. These measures contain information from both the earnings quarter (“within quarter”) and the period between that quarter's end and the earnings announcement date (“post...

This paper studies the impact of retail investors on stock liquidity during the Coronavirus pandemic lockdown in Spring 2020. Retail trading exhibits a sharp increase, especially among stocks with high COVID-19-related media coverage. Retail trading attenuated the rise in illiquidity by roughly...

Previous studies document a media-coverage discount in the cross-section of stock returns, which is attributed to Merton's investor-recognition hypothesis. This paper offers a natural experiment for this explanation by focusing on the media coverage of funds, not their underlying positions....