Investor attention matters for corporate actions. Our new identification approach constructs firm-level shareholder "distraction" measures, by exploiting exogenous shocks to unrelated parts of institutional shareholders' portfolios. Firms with "distracted" shareholders are more likely to...

Using a novel text-based measure of top management team diversity, covering over 70,000 top executives in over 6,500 U.S. firms from 1999 to 2014, we show that analyst forecasts are systematically more pessimistic for firms with more diverse top management teams ("diverse firms"), especially for...

We study marketplace credit around a tightening of mortgage loan-to-value (LTV) caps in several cities in China in 2013. Using novel micro data covering all loans and loan applications at a leading marketplace credit platform, we provide evidence consistent with home buyers borrowing online to...

We investigate how institutional ownership affects the diffusion of innovation. We find that a higher intensity of patent citations among firms that share institutional owners. We address the potential endogeneity of common ownership using two approaches. First, we use regression discontinuity...

We use the 2007 acquisition of Dow Jones & Co. by News Corporation to study whether the perception of a news source's political affiliation affects its credibility and financial market impact. Following 2007, the price of Republican- (Democrat-) aligned stocks becomes less sensitive to positive...

We use mergers in the global asset management industry to study the returns to scale from labor specialization. Mergers are followed by an increase in managerial turnover that assigns fund managers to more specialized tasks. This creates an incremental $54 million of value added per merger per...

Using a new dataset on employment at SEC-registered investment advisors, we analyze which clienteles, asset classes, and strategies require more human capital, as well as the value of human capital to investment managers. Controlling for assets, quantity of human capital is not associated with...

We study what determines catering through payout policy, and how the ability to cater affects firm policies. We create a catering index, measuring the extent to which the firm caters to its investors' payout preferences. Catering is constrained by market segmentation and dispersion in investor...

We study how organizational complexity affects capital structure and firm value. We measure organizational complexity as the number of layers in the firm's subsidiary structure, and focus on a sample of US firms over the period 1998-2006. We argue that organizational complexity makes the firm...