Why does the market react to companies’ announcements of strategic alternatives with a +5.2 percent return, only to experience a future return of -9.7 percent? We find evidence consistent with a mispricing explanation in that: (i) investors and analysts are overly optimistic about a potential...

Mergers and acquisitions are often motivated by the intention of creating value from intangible assets. We develop a novel word list of intangibles and apply it to takeover announcements. Deals presented with more “intangibles talk” complete more quickly. However, the value of these deals to...

The impact of the announcement of a takeover bid has been widely tested in foreign literature. Therefore, the main goal of this paper is to research the impact of the announcement of a takeover bid on the share price movements in the Croatian capital market and whether the results are consistent...

In this study, we explore the market reaction to the announcement of stock repurchase plans, and the mutual influence between the actual fulfillment rate of stock repurchase plans and the degree of earnings management. From the perspective of earnings management behavior, this paper also...

I analyze attention-induced stock repurchases. I hypothesize that firms that announce an open market repurchase program of a certain size are likely to follow through to a larger extent if they receive greater investor attention to their repurchase behavior. I test this hypothesis using 10-K and...

We document a strong positive initial market reaction to merger announcements from bidders with either large earnings growth or significant earnings decline, relative to those with neutral earnings change, reflecting a U-shaped pattern between bidders’ earnings growth and announcement returns....

I review the empirical literature on word of mouth (WOM) among investors. I begin with an outline of the empirical challenges that WOM research faces and possible strategies to overcome those challenges. I then discuss recent studies on WOM among retail and institutional investors. The research...

Despite the mounting evidence that stock misvaluation affects takeover characteristics and outcomes at the deal level, there remains a prolonged debate over whether mispricing drives aggregate industry-level merger activity. We depart from the extant literature and investigate whether stock...

What precisely is stock market short-termism? For an issue that pervades corporate governance thinking, rhetoric, and policymaking, one would think that we know well what it is. But much that’s called stock market short-termism is not properly categorized as such. This distinction—between...

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...