This paper studies institutional investors' decision-making using novel data from a major proxy advisor. We highlight the significant role of customized proxy advice in shaping shareholders' voting decisions. About 80% of funds receive customized advice, and custom recommendations differ...

Motivated by the public debate regarding corporate responsibility, we construct a memory-based model of decision-making to illustrate how corporate and political communication can impact policy preferences. We test the predictions of our model in a new large-scale survey of U.S. citizens on...

This paper investigates how shocks to expected cash flows influence CEO incentive compensation. Exploiting changes in compliance with environmental regulations as shocks to expected future cash flows, we find that adverse shocks typically prompt corporate boards to recalibrate CEO compensation...

Although corporate finance theory suggests how adverse shocks influence shareholder preferences toward corporate risk-taking and executive compensation, few researchers explore this relationship empirically. We construct a firm-year measure of unexpected shocks to environmental regulatory...

This study analyzes information production and trading behavior of banks with lending relationships. We combine trade-by-trade supervisory data and credit-registry data to examine banks' proprietary trading in borrower stocks around a large number of corporate events. We find that relationship...

For many firms, the acquisition process begins with the development of an acquisition plan that is communicated to investors. We construct a comprehensive sample of acquisition plans to provide novel perspectives on the acquisition process and find that acquisition plans are informative to...

We revisit the relationship between firm competition and real efficiency in a novel setting with informational feedback from financial markets. Although intensified competition can decrease market concentration in production, it reduces the value of proprietary information (e.g., market...

We examine how sell-side equity analysts strategically disclose information of differing quality to the public versus the buy-side mutual fund managers to whom they are connected. We consider cases in which analysts recommend that the public buys a stock, but some fund managers sell it. We...

This paper studies the transmission of monetary policy to the stock market through investors' discount factors. To isolate this channel, we investigate the effect of US monetary policy surprises on the ratio of prices of the same stock listed simultaneously in Hong Kong and Mainland China, and...

We find that procyclical stocks, whose returns comove with business cycles, earn higher average returns than countercyclical stocks. We use almost a three-quarter century of real GDP growth expectations from economists' surveys to determine forecasted economic states. This approach largely...