Purpose Utilising a database that distinctly classifies firm-level ESG (environmental, social and governance) news sentiment as positive or negative, the authors examine the information flow between the two types of ESG news sentiment and stock returns for 20 companies listed on the Johannesburg...

I examine how financial markets interact with news about the COVID-19 pandemic. A twelve topic model optimizes the trade-off between number of topics and topic coherence. Using this model, I show that before mid-March 2020 markets react more to the same quantum of news when volatility is higher...

We study earnings per share (EPS) forecast revision and accuracy of banking analysts around operational risk event announcements in U.S. banks. We find that first announcements of operational risk events are more informative than their settlement announcements. Optimistic banking analysts revise...

In this paper I develop a noisy-rational-expectations model with a risk-neutral market maker and speculators who display prospect theory-inspired preferences and who can acquire private information about a public announcement prior to its release. Private information acquisition decreases the...

Do equity investors care about pay dispersion and income inequality? We address this question by examining equity markets' reaction and investors' portfolio rebalancing in response to the first-time disclosure by U.S. public companies of the ratio of CEO to median worker pay in 2018. We find...

Major moves in Colombia's stock market in the 2000s correspond to major news of progress or setbacks in rebuilding the country's institutions, shattered by widespread guerrilla insurgencies in the 1990s. This contrasts with prior work reporting no news on major market moves in the US, a country...

Investors who use biased information from news media subsequently tend to make irrational decisions about acquiring firm-specific information compared to rational expectations. This model of information acquisition yields testable predictions that are verified by using a novel dataset. First,...

We provide new evidence on the role of management guidance in explaining earnings announcement-period returns. We show that guidance practices changed around the financial crisis in ways likely to affect the information content of guidance bundled with earnings. Managers provide guidance for a...

Using a novel natural experiment, we provide causal evidence on how asset prices are affected when the media draws investor attention to stale information. We find that shortly after the announcement of a high-profile financial analyst award, stocks with preexisting recommendations from analysts...

I dissect stock returns after earnings announcements into their overnight and intraday components and document strong positive abnormal overnight returns for several weeks after both large positive and negative earnings surprises. This finding is in line with attention-induced buying pressure....