Using a proprietary and unusually comprehensive database of hedge fund returns, we seek to identify abnormal performance consistent with opportunistic trading (e.g., bear raids) or synchronized actions (e.g., widespread forced liquidations) that could generate systemic risk. We find no evidence...

Since 2001, the number of financial statement line items forecasted by analysts and managers that I/B/E/S and FactSet capture in their electronic data feeds has soared. Taking advantage of this rich new data, we find that 11 income statement and two cash flow statement analyst and management...

Using a dataset of 3,234 letters sent by 434 hedge funds to their investors during 1995-2011, we study what motivates hedge fund managers to make voluntary disclosures. Contrary to the hedge fund industry's reputation for opacity, we observe that managers provide their investors with an array of...

We study the use of residual income (RI) valuation methods by U.S. sell-side equity analysts, particularly as compared to DCF. We document that RI valuations are rare — just 1/16th as common as DCF — and that different RI and DCF valuations are not infrequently provided by the same analyst...

We investigate the number of and reasons for errors and questionable judgments that sell-side equity analysts make in constructing and executing discounted cash flow (DCF) equity valuation models. For a sample of 120 DCF models detailed in reports issued by U.S. brokers in 2012 and 2013, we...

We take up Cochrane's (2011) challenge to identify the firm characteristics that provide independent information about average U.S. monthly stock returns by simultaneously including 94 characteristics in Fama-MacBeth regressions that avoid overweighting microcaps and adjust for data snooping...

We study the compensation earned by CEOs in private venture-backed firms. We extend the traditional view of pay-for-performance by proposing that the economic characteristics of startups and venture capital markets interact in such a way that CEOs will be rewarded for successfully raising new...

This study explores the roles that three kinds of nonfinancial variables - people, patents and policies - play in generating firms' near-term annual sales revenue. Due to data limitations on these variables for public companies, I use a rich and detailed set of information taken from surveys of...

Using a large quasi-time-series dataset, this paper describes and analyzes how a wide range of the economic characteristics of venture-backed firms change as such firms mature through their private, pre-exit stages of life. Three patterns emerge that I interpret as being consistent with a...

I propose that pre-IPO venture-backed biotech companies offer a productive new setting through which to discriminate among theories of why firm size and book-to-market explain variation in expected stock returns. This is because pre-IPO biotech firms have large and rapidly evolving growth...