We document a little-known source of information exploited by sophisticated institutional investors: the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), a law that allows for the disclosure of previously unreleased information by the U.S. Government. Through FOIA requests, we identify several sophisticated...

We examine whether professional money managers overreact to large climatic disasters. We find that managers within a major disaster region underweight disaster zone stocks to a much greater degree than distant managers and that this aversion to disaster zone stocks is related to a salience bias...

This paper develops a new approach that controls for commonalities in actively managed investment fund returns when measuring their performance. It is well-known that many investment funds may systematically load on common priced factors omitted from popular models, exhibit similarities in their...

This paper documents the tendency of mutual fund managers to follow analyst recommendation revisions when they trade stocks, and the impact of analyst revisioninduced mutual fund "herds" on stock prices. We find that mutual fund herds follow consensus revisions in analyst recommendations,...

This paper shows that publicly disclosed mutual fund portfolio holdings have investment value. Our approach is based on the intuition that an overweighting by successful managers, or an underweighting by unsuccessful managers signals that a stock is currently underpriced. Investment strategies...

Theories of herding behavior predict that only investors with sufficiently precise private information or those most overconfident will deviate from the crowd. Using portfolio holdings, this paper identifies contrarian funds as those pursuing distinctive investment strategies, i.e., as those...

Using a comprehensive database of corporate news, we find that bond funds trade against the direction of news sentiment. The trading against news phenomenon is concentrated in funds selling on positive news and in the post-financial crisis period when dealer liquidity provision is constrained....