High-frequency trading has become a dominant force in the U.S. capital market, accounting for over 70% of dollar trading volume. This study examines the implication of high-frequency trading for stock price volatility and price discovery. I find that high-frequency trading is positively...

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...

Variation in idiosyncratic return volatility from 1978 to 2009 is attributable to discretionary accrual volatility and the correlation between pre-managed earnings and discretionary accruals reflective of information quality across firms. These results are robust to controls for firm operating...

Financial crises are typically marked by substantial increases in ambiguity where prices appear to decouple from fundamentals. Consistent with ambiguity-based asset pricing theories, we find that ambiguity concerns are more severe for firms with higher pre-crisis earnings volatility, causing...

We examine the role of concurrent information in the striking increase in investor response to earnings announcements from 2001 to 2016, as measured by return variability and volume following Beaver (1968). We find management guidance, analyst forecasts, and disaggregated financial statement...

In this paper, we characterize the relative importance of two sources of fundamental market-wide news—large firms’ earnings announcements and macroeconomic releases. Our investigation is motivated by growing concerns in the financial community about the increasing impact of individual...

We exploit information in option prices in order to study whether the ex post responsiveness of tock prices to earnings information is reflected from an ex ante, firm- and quarter-specific perspective. Specifically, we develop a measure of anticipated information content (AIC) that isolates the...

I propose to use volatility to infer opportunistic insider sales. I argue that insider sales occurring when volatility is low are suspicious and that these suspicious sales are likely to be driven by insiders’ private information for the following reasons. Suppose that insider sales are not...

Purpose: Higher real earnings management (REM) reduces financial reporting quality and increases the uncertainty of future cash flows and profitability among investors. We assert that REM induced noise increases idiosyncratic return volatility (IVOL) and aim to examine the association between...

The primary aim of this study is to investigate the stock return volatility surrounding management earnings forecasts. Disclosure by managers of expected earnings are particularly important communications, and as such, it is important to understand the capital market implications surrounding...