We study the role of hedge funds in the venture capital market over 1985-2016. Hedge funds invest in companies in later stages when compared to traditional venture capitalists and outperform conditional on stage of entry. Hedge funds also invest in venture companies to exploit their stock...

Modigliani and Miller (M&M) proposed that investors forgo dividends, leaving the money available for reinvestment as retained earnings. This recommendation takes two parts: Proposition III, i.e., a dividend has no impact on market value, and Proposition IV, i.e., that financial policy is of no...

I construct and study a comprehensive novel dataset on Chinese equity analysts. I find the analysts possess significant forecasting skill. First, I find that more favorable recommendations predict better stock performance for at least six months after the recommendation. Second, the value of...

We study a unique Chinese dataset of equity analysts' on-site visits to publicly listed companies. We find that analyst silence (no release of report from visit date to the next quarterly earnings announcement) contains information that negatively impacts both stock returns and earnings...

Firms that report consecutive earnings increases, called earnings strings, receive an overvaluation from the stock market. We examine whether the presence of earnings strings affects equity research analysts' opinions beyond company fundamentals. We find that analysts issue more optimistic...

Purpose: This study investigates the behavior of sell-side analysts covering firms that are about to experience breaks in strings of consecutive quarterly earnings increases.Design/methodology/approach: We estimate the likelihood of analysts predicting a break using logit regressions for 1.8M...

We study sell-side analysts' motives to diversify their portfolios across industries. Despite the negative association between diversification and accuracy, over 60% of analysts cover multiple industries. We argue that analysts' choice to diversify is rooted in concerns about future job...

We consider a model where investors can invest directly or search for an asset manager, information about assets is costly, and managers charge an endogenous fee. The efficiency of asset prices is linked to the efficiency of the asset management market: if investors can find managers more...

While US companies mainly list their board of directors alphabetically, this is not the case for Chinese companies, most of which list their independent directors last. We interpret the listing order of Chinese directors as board hierarchy, reflecting power allocation within the board. Based on...

I use the opportunity of commenting on Cassell, Myers, and Seidel (CMS) to discuss the broader issue of the relation between disclosure quality and reporting quality. Three aspects of this relation are worth exploring: (1) joint decision making, (2) incentives, and (3) temporal variation. I...