Inadequate sleep is a public health epidemic in the U.S., and poor sleep habits are especially common among professional investors. Neuroscience research finds that sleep disruption inhibits information processing by impairing higher-order cognitive functions. Using Daylight Saving Time (DST)...

This study constructs a novel measure that aims to capture face-to-face private communications between firm managers and sell-side analysts by mapping detailed, large-volume taxi trip records from New York City to the GPS coordinates of companies and brokerages. Consistent with earnings releases...

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...

The JOBS Act allows certain analysts to be more involved in the IPO process, but does not relax restrictions on analyst compensation structure. We find that these analysts initiate coverage that is more optimistically biased, less accurate, and generates smaller stock market reactions. Investors...

Using hand-collected information, we find that analysts who own stock in a company they follow make more informative recommendations and exert more effort in covering the company. However, we also find that analysts with stock ownership issue more optimistic target price forecasts. These...

We examine the information transmission role of stock recommendation revisions by sell-side security analysts. Revisions are associated with economically insignificant mean price reactions and often piggyback on recent news, events, long-term momentum, and short-run contrarian return predictors,...

Information flows are of critical importance for IPO pricing. We posit that individual investment bankers use personal social capital to address information problems during IPOs. Using a unique database of mutual fund bids in the Chinese IPO market, we find that when an investment banker has a...

This paper provides evidence that the market does not efficiently incorporate expected returns implied by analyst price targets into prices. I use a novel decomposition to extract information and bias components from these analyst-expected returns and develop an asset pricing framework that...

This paper examines the effect of Environmental-, Social- and Governance- (ESG) rating events on returns and risks of stocks based on a large sample of US firms and their MSCI ESG ratings. Using event study methodology, we find that markets react with significant negative abnormal returns to...

We examine how the media influences retail trade and market returns during the “quiet period” that follows a firm's IPO. We find that more media coverage during this period is associated with more purchases by retail investors and that such purchases are attention-driven, rather than...