Research suggests certain investors face significant information disadvantages, particularly during earnings announcements. We investigate whether financial analysis on Seeking Alpha, a prominent social media platform hosting original financial analysis, can mitigate this disadvantage. First, we...

Using theories from the behavioral finance literature to predict that investors are attracted to industries with more salient outcomes and that therefore firms in such industries have higher valuations, we find that firms in industries that have high industry-level dispersion of profitability...

Optimal investment of firms implies that expected stock returns are tied with the expected marginal benefit of investment divided by the marginal cost of investment. Winners have higher expected growth and expected marginal productivity (two major components of the marginal benefit of...

We offer an investment-based interpretation of price and earnings momentum. The neoclassical theory of investment implies that expected stock returns are tied with the expected marginal benefit of investment divided by the marginal cost of investment. Winners have higher expected growth and...

FinTech makes numerous financial products accessible to common investors but up to now, there is no risk measure method specially customized for common investors instead of financial institutions which are generally too big to fail. This paper develops a hedging-based utility risk measure (HBU)...

Traditional risk factor models indicate that hedge funds capture pre-fee alphas of 6% to 10% per annum over the period from 1996 to 2012. At the same time, the hedge fund return series is not reliably distinguishable from the returns of mechanical S&P 500 put-writing strategies. We show that the...

This study investigates whether firm opacity impacts the investment behaviors and outcomes of retail investors using the fintech brokerage Robinhood (i.e., “RH investors”). We theorize that higher firm opacity leads RH investors to make nonrational investment decisions. The testable...

Is shareholder interest in corporate social responsibility driven by pecuniary motives (abnormal rates of return) or non-pecuniary ones (willingness to sacrifice returns to address various firm externalities)? To answer this question, we categorize the literature into seven tests: (1) costs of...

This study extends the employee stock option literature by examining how the timing of sales of shares acquired at exercise varies with accrual management both before and after the exercise date. We find evidence that accrual management prior to exercise is positively associated with the...

This paper extends the work of Cecere et al. (Appl. Econ., 49(57): 5802-5813, 2017) and explores the antecedents of backers' decision to invest in projects from eight categories on a reward-based crowdfunding platform in China. We extract data from 2011 to 2016 from the pioneer Chinese...