Despite a large literature on discretionary accruals, how the use of discretionary accruals impacts corporate financial decisions is not well understood. We hypothesize that a financially constrained firm with valuable projects can use discretionary accruals to credibly signal positive...

Takeover bidders in stock-for-stock mergers have strong incentives to increase their own pre-merger stock prices to lower their acquisition costs. We find that before announcements of stock mergers, bidders manage down analyst earnings forecasts prior to earnings releases. Such expectation...

We study the effects of local religious beliefs on mutual fund risk-taking behaviors. Funds located in low-Protestant or high-Catholic areas exhibit significantly higher fund return volatilities. Similar differences persist when we use the religiosity ratios at fund managers' college locations....

The return premium associated with the Amihud (2002) measure is generally considered a liquidity premium that compensates for price impact. We find that the pricing of the Amihud measure is not attributable to the construction of the return-to-volume ratio that is intended to capture price...

We collect a unique dataset of Twitter posts to examine the change in investor disagreement around earnings announcements. We find that investors' opinions can either converge (reduced disagreement) or diverge (increased disagreement) around earnings announcements. The convergence and divergence...