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...

We analyze a manager's optimal disclosure policy in a market in which some traders are confirmation-biased and ignore information inconsistent with their priors. The disclosed signal informs traders about the manager's unknown ability. By exerting costly effort, the manager can increase the...

Earnings conference calls represent an important communication channel for investors to observe managerial behavior. We examine the impact of executive temperament using weather conditions at executive locations during these calls. Using a large sample of earnings conference calls from 2006 to...

In response to the increasing use of computer programs to process firm disclosures, this registered report develops a new measure of “scriptability” that reflects computerized, rather than human, information processing costs. We validate our measure using SEC filing-derived data from prior...

The SEC prohibits the presentation of non‐GAAP measures before corresponding GAAP measures; however, a large proportion of non‐GAAP reporters present non‐GAAP EPS before GAAP EPS in their earnings announcements. This noncompliance raises questions about whether firms use prominence to...

I provide a general framework of firms' financial communication process and investor response to information, moving from disclosure through dissemination to investor response and management response. I then discuss the entrance of social media into firm communications, highlighting both classic...

In response to the increasing use of computer programs to process firm disclosures, this registered report develops a new measure of “scriptability” that reflects computerized, rather than human, information processing costs. We validate our measure using SEC filing‐derived data from prior...

We examine whether the U.S. partisan gap over the COVID-19 pandemic finds its way into corporate decisions in terms of how firms communicate the impact of the pandemic to investors. Specifically, we examine whether executives’ political leanings affect their firms’ qualitative disclosures...

Prior literature documents that short sale activity clusters around mandated short sale position disclosures. We investigate two competing hypotheses for this finding in the UK market: herding- versus information-based trading. First, using an entropy-balanced matched sample of stocks, we find...

We investigate the impact of peer pressure on the characteristics of forward-looking disclosures. We identify plausibly exogenous variation in the amount of peer firm forecast news available when a focal firm issues its own forecast by employing a sample of firms that issue forecasts in...