Many recent studies have analyzed the impact that corporate events or managerial decisions have on operating performance. In these studies, researchers face many methodological choices. This paper analyzes the effect that three dimensions of choice have on the specification and power of...

Using the ratio of odd-lot purchases to sales as a measure of small investor sentiment, this research documents that small firms do well (poorly) when small investors are optimistic (pessimistic). In contrast, large firms are generally unaffected by the sentiment of small investors. From 1941...

Mutual funds that hold private securities value these securities at considerably different prices. Prices vary across fund families, are updated every 2.5 quarters on average and are revised dramatically at follow-on funding events. The infrequent, but dramatic price changes yield predictable...

We show the math gender gap is correlated with women's career outcomes using international geographic data on the investment profession, a math-intensive and 80% male profession. The math gender gap predicts the proportion of investment professionals who are women across countries and across...

Rational models claim “trading to learn” explains widespread excessive speculative trading and challenge behavioral explanations of excessive trading. We argue rational learning models do not explain speculative trading by studying day traders in Taiwan. Consistent with previous studies of...

General partners (GPs) in private equity (PE) report the performance of an existing fund while raising capital for a follow-on fund. Interim performance has large effects on fundraising outcomes; the impact is greatest when backed by exits and for low reputation GPs. Faced with these incentives,...

Individual investor trading results in systematic and economically large losses. Using a complete trading history of all investors in Taiwan, we document that the aggregate portfolio of individuals suffers an annual performance penalty of 3.8 percentage points. Individual investor losses are...

We study the trading of individual investors using transaction data and identifying buyer- or seller-initiated trades. We document four results: (1) Small trade order imbalance correlates well with order imbalance based on trades from retail brokers. (2) Individual investors herd. (3) When...

We test and confirm the hypothesis that individual investors are net buyers of attention-grabbing stocks, e.g., stocks in the news, stocks experiencing high abnormal trading volume, and stocks with extreme one-day returns. Attention-driven buying results from the difficulty that investors have...