This study examines the role of expectations management in explaining why firms with high dispersion in analyst forecasts experience relatively low future stock returns. We first demonstrate that the negative relation between dispersion and returns is concentrated around earnings announcements...

Investment characteristics and the form of external financing are linked. Factor analysis indicates that the principal determinant of the financing choice is whether an investment's payoffs can be described as a hit or miss. Hit-or-miss investments are more likely to be equity financed. Equity...

Political risk relates to both the ability and the willingness of governments to repay debts. We find that bond prices only slowly adapt to changes in political risk. The expected bond returns for countries whose political risk ratings have improved are higher than those for countries whose...

We use meta-analysis to review studies on announcement effects associated with seasoned equity offerings. Our sample includes 199 studies from 38 leading finance journals and SSRN working papers. The studies cover different countries, but the U.S. is particularly well-represented with 131...

This study presents evidence suggesting that investors do not fully unravel predictable pessimism in sell-side analysts' earnings forecasts. We show that measures of prior consensus and individual analyst forecast pessimism are predictive of both the sign of firms' earnings surprises and the...

This study empirically tests the tradeoff between the costs and benefits of agglomeration for a large sample of firms. In line with the existing literature, we find that population and employment density benefit productivity but increase labor and real estate costs. To test the tradeoff of...

We provide evidence that security design reflects the interplay of capital supplier and security issuer preferences. While call provisions have historically been the default option in convertible security design, only a minority of post-2005 issues are callable. Because hedge funds dominate the...

This paper introduces the concept of divergence of sentiment to the behavioral finance literature. We measure the distance between people with positive and negative sentiment on a daily basis for 20 countries by using data from status updates on Facebook. The prediction is that a higher...

Directors are not one-dimensional. We characterize their skill sets by exploiting Regulation S-K's 2009 requirement that U.S. firms must disclose the experience, qualifications, attributes or skills that led the nominating committee to choose an individual as a director. We then examine how...

This paper shows the importance of correcting for sample selection when investing in illiquid assets that trade endogenously. Using a sample of 32,928 paintings that sold repeatedly between 1960 and 2013, we find an asymmetric V-shaped relation between sale probabilities and returns. Adjusting...