We find that changes in short interest predict banks’ stock returns during two recent banking crises. Furthermore, before the 2007-2008 crisis, short interest increased more for banks with worse performance during the Long-Term Capital Management crisis of 1998. We also find that changes in...

Our paper examines whether investor opinions expressed in social media predicted stock returns of financial firms during the 2007-2009 global financial crisis. We conduct a textual analysis of the articles published on the stock market insight website Seeking Alpha before the crisis and find...

Using a novel dataset of firm-level perceived trustworthiness from the news media and social media, we find that lending banks charge significantly higher loan spread on firms with lower trustworthiness. Loans to these firms also tend to have shorter loan maturities, more financial covenants,...

We study whether bank CEO optimism (optimistic bank) plays a role in technological progress. We find that optimistic banks lend more to smaller/riskier firms and charge higher loan spreads to compensate for the higher risk exposures. More interestingly, these optimistic banks prefer lending to...

Using a difference-in-differences approach, we show that relaxation of short-sale constraints helps to filter out low-quality borrowers from the bank loan market. Treated firms that can still borrow from banks enjoy a lower loan spread, compared with control firms without this sorting mechanism....

We identify the endogenous social effects proposed by Manski (1993) in firm R&D spending. By using state-level Uniform Trade Secrets Act (UTSA) enactments as exogenous shocks, we find that focal firms respond positively to peers' R&D expenditure. The results suggest that managerial learning and...

We analyze whether the disaggregation quality (DQ) of a borrower's financial statement is associated with its bank loan pricing. We find that firms with low DQ have high bank loan spreads and total cost of borrowing. These results are more pronounced for risky and poorly governed firms....