We study the relation between mutual fund trades and media coverage of stocks. We find that on average mutual funds tend to trade high-coverage stocks. Meanwhile, funds display substantial cross-sectional heterogeneity in terms of their propensity to trade high-coverage stocks. The more likely...

Short selling frictions cannot explain the persistence of seven prominent stock anomalies. Long-only investing is robust and profitable and can be further enhanced by using a synthetic short. Moreover, portfolios restricted to stocks that are easy to short sell continue to have large and...

Due to a regulatory exemption, ETF market makers can satisfy excess demand in secondary markets by selling ETF shares that have not yet been created. While this ability to “operationally short” is not unique to ETFs, it plays a more prominent role in ETF liquidity provision, and results in...

Is shareholder interest in corporate social responsibility driven by pecuniary motives (abnormal rates of return) or non-pecuniary ones (willingness to sacrifice returns to address various firm externalities)? To answer this question, we categorize the literature into seven tests: (1) costs of...

When a short seller sells shares on day t (trade date) but fails to deliver those shares on day t+3 (settlement date), non-existent (electronic) shares are in circulation. Corporate executives and regulators often contend that high “fail-to-deliver” (FTD) levels indicate that short sellers...

This article utilises commodity specific news sentiment data provided by Thomson Reuters News Analytics to examine the relationship between news sentiment and returns in the gold futures market over the period 2003–2012. There is an asymmetric response to news releases with negative news...

We propose a model of delegated portfolio management with career concerns. Investors hire fund managers to invest their capital either in risky bonds or in riskless assets. Some managers have superior information on the default risk. Looking at the past performance, investors update beliefs on...

This dissertation consists of two essays investigating the trading by institutions and its impact on the stock market. In the first essay, I investigate why changes in institutional breadth predict return. I first show that changes in breadth are positively associated with abnormal returns over...

Institutional funds have concentrated ownership by a few institutional investors, infrequent outflows and essentially no leverage. Yet using unique granular data on the bond holdings of institutional funds, we show that their trading behavior is strongly procyclical: they actively move into...