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...

This paper investigates how the disclosure tone of earnings conference calls predicts future stock price crash risk. Using U.S. public firm earnings conference call transcripts from 2010 to 2015, we find that firms exhibiting more pessimistic tone during the current year-end call experience...

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...

Using a unique database of 990 VC-backed Belgian firms, we study whether compatibility between corporate and environmental characteristics matters. We address two questions: (i) Does the interplay of company, industry, and product factors affect the expected returns of the VC-backed firms? (ii)...

Recent studies highlight positive effect of political connections on firm performance and stock returns. This paper shows that the positive effect of political connections on the cross-sectional stock returns disappears in the lame duck presidency period, defined as the last two years before the...

The complex behavior of financial markets emerges from decisions made by many traders. Here, we exploit a large corpus of daily print issues of the Financial Times from 2nd January 2007 until 31st December 2012 to quantify the relationship between decisions taken in financial markets and...

The impact of U.S. bank loan announcements on the stock prices of the corporate borrowers has been decreasing during the two last decades with estimated two-day cumulative abnormal returns slipping from almost 200 basis points in the beginning of the 1980s to close to zero by the turn of the...

This paper studies the effect of new fund flows on investment behavior and the resulting equilibrium price of risk. The Small Fund Industry model shows equilibria with overinvestment in unprofitable and underinvestment in profitable investment opportunities. The Large Fund Industry model derives...

Based on full-displayed limit order book data from the electronic trading system Xetra, I study traders' tendency to herd in their decisions to buy or to sell securities around the time of news release. In more detail, I study the impact of company-specific, real-time messages routed by Reuters...

This paper shows that in asset pricing the information environment gives rise to a systematic risk factor when the informativeness of future news events varies with their content (i.e., bad news and good news are not equally informative). The paper further shows that in such cases (cross) serial...