We investigate whether unpleasant environmental conditions affect stock market participants' responses to information events. We draw from psychology research to develop a new prediction that weather-induced negative moods reduce market participants' activity levels. Exploiting geographic...

Mutual funds hold 32% of the U.S. equity market and comprise 58% of retirement savings, yet retail investors consistently make poor choices when selecting funds. Theory suggests that poor choices are partially due to mutual fund managers creating unnecessarily complex disclosures and fee...

Individual investors often neglect value-relevant accounting information and instead underperform by trading on technical trends. We investigate the frictions that impede individual investors' use of accounting information, and in particular their costs of monitoring and acquiring accounting...

This paper reviews the literature examining how costs of monitoring for, acquiring, and analyzing firm disclosures – collectively, “disclosure processing costs” – affect investor information choices, trades, and market outcomes. The existence of disclosure processing costs means that...

We investigate the frictions that impede individual investors' use of accounting information and, in particular, their costs of monitoring and acquiring accounting disclosures. We do so using an archival setting in which individuals are presented with automated media articles that report both...

Each year, the NCAA basketball tournament (March Madness) is a daytime distraction for millions of people, providing a largely exogenous shock to investor attention. We investigate whether March Madness influences the market response to earnings by diverting investor attention away from earnings...