This paper examines the impact of complex yet precise language, particularly financial jargon, on information dissemination and ultimately market efficiency. As a natural laboratory, we analyze the information exchanged during earnings conference calls, where we instrument jargon with the Plain...

Past research shows that the outcomes of acquisitions of private firms are better than those of public firms. This finding is commonly explained by the price discount due to illiquidity and the higher information risk involved in acquiring private firms. Existing studies do not separate the two...

The media commonly gauges a firm's performance by comparing its performance to others within the same industry. We provide evidence that investors and analysts positively value improvements to the firm's relative performance ranking (RPR) within its industry. Consistently, RPR is positively...

We study whether social media can play a negative information role by impeding price discovery in the presence of highly speculative rumors. We focus on merger rumors, where most do not materialize. We find that merger rumors accompanied by greater Twitter activity elicit greater immediate...

We examine whether financial analysts strategically time the announcement of their recommendation revisions consistent with their incentives to maintain relations with management. We provide evidence that investor and media attention to recommendation revisions is reduced on weekends, which...

We examine if investor expectations of two common disclosure mediums (conference calls and Twitter) interact with a CEO's communication style to influence investor judgments. Consistent with theory, results show that when the disclosure medium is a conference call, investors are less willing to...

We examine the impact of distance on Internet search, and the effect of the “local bias” in search on the stock market response around earnings announcements. We find significant local bias in search behavior. Motivated by theories explaining local bias, local information advantage and...

We analyze management's emphasis (i.e., prominence, frequency, and textual highlighting) of GAAP metrics within the narrative portion of earnings announcement press releases; we assess whether management uses emphasis opportunistically, informatively, or both. We find that management emphasizes...

Prior studies use fundamental earnings forecasts to proxy for the market's expectations of earnings because analyst forecasts are biased and are available for only a subset of firms. We find that as a proxy for market expectations, fundamental forecasts contain systematic measurement errors...

I investigate the effect of analysts on the speed with which bad news is reflected in earnings. Intuitively, the more analysts that cover a firm, the more costly it will be for the firm to keep bad news suppressed. Thus, analyst coverage should positively affect bad news timeliness (BNT) (but...