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....

In a single information transfer setting, we detect both under- and overreactions of stock prices to corporate earnings news. We find that the stock prices of a firm's blockholder underreact to the firm's earnings news but the stock prices of the firm overreact to its blockholder's earnings...

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...

The U.S. equity markets have experienced a remarkable decline in IPOs since 2000, both in terms of smaller IPO volume and entrepreneurial firms' greater tendency to exit through acquisitions rather than IPOs. Using proprietary U.S. Census data on private firms, we conduct a comprehensive...

In this paper, we study the relationship between default probability and stock returns. Using the market-based measure of Expected Default Frequency* (EDF) constructed by Moody's KVM, we first demonstrate that higher default probabilities are not necessarily associated with higher expected stock...

This paper examines the relationship between default probability and stock returns. Using the Expected Default Frequency (EDF) of Moody's KMV, we document that higher default probabilities are not associated with higher expected stock returns. Within a model of bargaining between equity-holders...

202,616 Twitter posts covering 1,082 firms from November 2008 to June 2011 reveal that nonlocal Twitter posters consistently exhibit negative stock return predictability. Since nonlocal posts dominate the sentiment information from social media, this contrarian result highlights the danger of...

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 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...

This paper examines the relationship between default probability and stock returns. Using the Expected Default Frequency (EDF) of Moody's KMV, we document that higher default probabilities are not associated with higher expected stock returns. Within a model of bargaining between equity holders...