Equity research analysts tend to cover firms about which they have favorable views. We exploit this tendency to infer analysts' preferences for corporate policies from their coverage decisions. We then use exogenous analyst disappearances to examine the effect of these preferences on corporate...

Private equity firms increasingly sell companies to each other in secondary buyouts (SBOs). We examine commonly expressed concerns regarding SBOs using novel and unique datasets. SBOs made by buyers under pressure to spend capital (a minority of transactions) underperform and destroy value for...

We examine how investor attention changes when a firm adopts a modern news dissemination technology. We find that after continental European firms begin using an English-language electronic wire service to disseminate company news, they exhibit a stronger initial reaction to earnings surprises,...

Potential conflicts of interest arise when IPO underwriters allocate IPO shares to their affiliated funds. We hypothesize that such nepotism incentives affect IPO pricing. Using a novel hand-collected dataset, we find support for this hypothesis in a regression discontinuity design (RDD): a one...