We find that acquirers create higher shareholder returns when advised by investment banks with more experience in the target industry. This finding is stronger when acquirers face more difficulties understanding and evaluating the targets. Further analyses show that these banks help acquirers...

In the feld of empirical asset pricing, the challenges of high dimensionality, non-linear relationships, and interaction efects have led to the increasing popularity of machine learning (ML) methods. This study investigates the performance of ML methods when predicting diferent measures of stock...

Combining novel data on analyst employment history and mutual fund commission payments, we show that client funds generate higher returns on stocks for which they have access to research by industry expert analysts. The outperformance is greater when funds are more important clients, and it...