Managers conducting earnings conference calls display distinctive styles in their word choice. Some CEOs and CFOs routinely use qualifying words such as "approximately", "probably", and "maybe". They are vague talkers. Straight talkers, by contrast, use such words less frequently. Analysts and...

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,...

Recent crises have seen very large spikes in asset price risk without dramatic shifts in fundamentals. We propose an explanation for these risk panics based on self-fulfilling shifts in risk made possible by a negative link between the current asset price and risk about the future asset price....

Identifying unambiguously the presence of a bubble in an asset price remains an unsolved problem in standard econometric and financial economic approaches. A large part of the problem is that the fundamental value of an asset is, in general, not directly observable and it is poorly constrained...

A major inconvenience of the traditional approach in portfolio choice, based upon historical information, is its inability to anticipate sudden changes of price tendencies. Introducing information about future behavior of the assets fundamentals may help to make more appropiate choices. However...

The aim of this study is to examine whether securitized real estate returns reflect direct real estate returns or general stock market returns using international data for the U.S., U.K., and Australia. In contrast to previous research, which has generally relied on overall real estate market...

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...

We test if issuers of asset- and mortgage-backed securities receive rating favors from agencies with which they maintain strong business relationships. Controlling for issuer fixed effects and a large set of credit risk determinants, we show that agencies publish better ratings for those issuers...

In this paper, we examine the performance of three DeMark indicators (Sequential, Combo and Setup trend), which constitute specific implementations of technical analysis often used by practitioners, over twenty-one commodity futures markets and ten years of daily data. Our work addresses price...