We establish a link between firms managing investors' performance expectations, earnings announcement premia, and cyclical patterns (i.e., seasonalities) in returns. Firms that are more likely to manage expectations toward beatable levels predictably earn lower returns before, and higher returns...

We show the cost of trading on negative news, relative to positive news, increases before earnings announcements. Our evidence suggests this asymmetry is due to financial intermediaries reducing their exposure to announcement risks by providing liquidity asymmetrically. This asymmetry creates a...

We develop and implement a new measure of information asymmetry among traders. Our measure is based on the intuition that informed traders are more likely than uninformed traders to generate abnormal volume in options or stock markets. We formalize this intuition theoretically and compute the...

Using novel earnings calendar data, we show that firms' advanced scheduling of earnings announcement dates foreshadows their earnings news. Firms that schedule later-than-expected announcement dates subsequently announce worse news than those scheduling earlier-than-expected announcement dates....

We examine the information content of option and equity volumes when trade direction is unobserved. In a multimarket symmetric information model, we show that equity short-sale costs result in a negative relation between relative option volume and future firm value. In our empirical tests,...

We examine the information content of option and equity volumes when trade direction is unobserved. In a multimarket asymmetric information model, equity short-sale costs result in a negative relation between relative option volume and future firm value. In our empirical tests, firms in the...

This paper examines the implications of the option value of equity for firms' disclosures. Merton (1974) shows that the equity of levered firms is equivalent to a call option whose value increases in the expected variance of future cash flows. I use this equivalence to calculate firms' vega,...

We examine how the information produced by analysts when they initiate coverage contributes to the mix of firm-specific, industry-, and market-wide information available about the firm. We hypothesize that the first analyst to initiate coverage provides low cost market and industry information...

We show that analyst coverage proxies contain information about expected returns. We decompose analyst coverage into abnormal and expected components using a simple characteristic-based model and show that firms with abnormally high analyst coverage subsequently outperform firms with abnormally...