Private equity is a substantial and growing component of institutional investors’ portfolios. Investors rely on manager-reported fund performance when making capital allocation decisions, yet reported performance is subject to significant manager discretion. I examine whether private equity...

We examine whether activists exhibit persistent cross-sectional performance differences in identifying targets to short. We find no evidence of performance persistence using target returns, consistent with Ljungqvist and Qian (2016), but document that the current target is more likely to delist...

The arrival of new, unfamiliar, investment opportunities is often associated with "exuberant" movements in asset prices and real economic activity. During these episodes of high uncertainty, financial markets look at the real sector for signals about the profitability of the new investment...

Recent research finds that investors, broadly defined, react to the linguistic tone of quarterly earnings conference calls; there is a positive relation between firms' stock returns and call tone (a measure of “sentiment” related word tabulations). However, this type of soft information can...

Quarterly earnings conference calls are becoming a more pervasive tool for corporate disclosure. However, the extent to which the market embeds information contained in the tone (i.e. sentiment) of conference call wording is unknown. Using computer aided content analysis, we examine the...

In this paper, I examine the relations between risk management disclosures, governance, and the market pricing of the fair value gains and losses (FVGL) for US commercial bank holding companies (banks). I find that banks with strong corporate governance disclose more about their risk management...

Stock market anomalies representing the predictability of cross-sectional stock returns are one of most controversial topics in financial economic research. This chapter reviews several well-documented and pervasive anomalies in the literature, including investment-related anomalies, value...

Asset allocation models have evolved in complexity with the development of modern portfolio theory, but they continue to operate under the assumption of investor rationality and other assumptions that do not hold in the real world. For this reason, academics and industry professionals make...

We find a positive association between short-selling and accruals during 1988-2009, and that asymmetry between the long and short sides of the accrual anomaly is stronger when constraints on short-arbitrage are more severe (low availability of loanable shares as proxied by institutional...

We establish a link between firms managing investors' performance expectations, earnings announcement premia, and cyclical patterns (i.e., seasonalities) in returns. Firms that are more likely to manage expectations toward beatable levels predictably earn lower returns before, and higher returns...