This is the first comprehensive study of mutual fund voting in proxy contests. Mutual funds tend to vote for dissident nominees at firms with weak operating and financial performance, and when dissidents are hedge funds. Notably, passive funds are more likely to support incumbent management than...

Shadow banking in China may not be as shadowy as you think. Defined simply as loans made outside the formal banking sector, shadow banking derives a big chunk of its ante from individual investors buying so-called wealth management products, or short term bundled loans devised by banks and other...

A relatively new activist investor strategy is to purchase shares in the acquirer after an M&A announcement and exercise shareholder rights to change deal terms, or even to block the deal, through public campaigns. We provide new evidence on how the strategy affects target firms and activists'...

This paper studies how demand for labor reacts to financial technology (fintech) shocks based on comprehensive databases of fintech patents and firm job postings in the U.S. during the past decade. We first develop a measure of fintech exposure at the occupation level by intersecting the textual...

Using numeric and textual data extracted from over 50,000 finance articles in SSRN during 2001--2019, we examine the relationship between measured qualities and a paper’s readership, eventual outlet, and impact. Conventionality (semantic similarity with existent research) helps boost...

We develop measures for technology decoupling and dependence between the U.S. and China based on combined patent data. The first two decades of the century witnessed a steady increase in technology integration (or less decoupling), but China’s dependence on the U.S. increased (decreased)...

This paper formalizes a novel form of corporate insider trading based on non-insider information. In our model, insiders make trading decisions in anticipation of activist intervention. Because insiders have access to private information about firm fundamentals, they can better separate...

Prior to 2009, women made up about 8% of the directors of US corporate boards. That proportion has since risen to 19% in 2019 among public firms, while private firms have not witnessed notable improvement. This study highlights the general lack of board turnover, i.e., long tenure enjoyed by the...

An AI analyst we build to digest corporate financial information, qualitative disclosure, and macroeconomic indicators are able to beat the majority of human analysts in stock price forecasts and generate excess returns compared to following human analysts. In the contest of “man vs...