We explore a new mechanism through which investors take correlated shortcuts. Specifically, we exploit a regulatory provision governing firm classification into industries: A firm’s industry classification is determined by the segment that has the majority of sales. We find strong evidence...

We show that Treasury security prices in the secondary market decrease significantly before subsequent auctions and recover shortly after. This price pattern implies a large issuance cost for the Treasury Department, which is estimated to be between 9 and 18 basis points of the auction size. For...

We exploit a novel setting in which the same piece of information affects two sets of firms: one set of firms requires straightforward processing to update prices, while the other set requires more complicated analyses to incorporate the same piece of information into prices. We document...

This paper proposes and tests an investment-flow based explanation for three empirical findings on return predictability – the persistence of mutual fund performance, the “smart money¶ effect, and stock price momentum. Since mutual fund managers generally scale up or down their existing...

This paper provides empirical evidence that managers adjust firm advertising expenditures to influence investor behavior and short-term stock prices. First, this paper shows that increased advertising spending is associated with individual investor buying and a contemporaneous rise in abnormal...

We propose a novel measure of arbitrage activity to examine whether arbitrageurs can have a destabilizing e¤ect in the stock market. We apply our insight to stock price mo- mentum, a classic example of an unanchored strategy that exhibits positive feedback since arbitrageurs buy stocks when...

The conventional view of market timing suggests an unambiguous, negative relation between equity misvaluation and the equity share in new issues|that is, rms with overvalued equity issue more equity and, all else equal, less debt. We question this conventional view in the paper. Using price...