This paper examines whether the additional layers of delegation found in the pension fund industry generate agency costs that impair pension fund performance. Corporate treasurers, who have an incentive to reduce their own job risk, tend to hire pension fund managers with low tracking error....

Crowdsourcing — when a task normally performed by employees is outsourced to a large network of people via an open call — is making inroads into the investment research industry. We shed light on this new phenomenon by examining the value of crowdsourced earnings forecasts. Our sample...

Psychology research identifies extraversion as the personality trait most closely associated with leadership emergence. We examine executive extraversion, as measured by speech patterns during conference calls, and find extraverts experience significant career benefits. Controlling for executive...

We examine whether access to management at broker-hosted investor conferences leads to more informative research by analysts. We find analyst recommendation changes have larger immediate price impacts when the analyst's firm has a conference-hosting relationship with the company. The effect...

We examine the cross-section of skill among non-professional analysts (NPAs) on Seeking Alpha, a prominent crowd-sourced investment research platform. We estimate that 60% of NPAs are skilled, and we document substantial dispersion in skill. Even after accounting for bid-ask spreads and allowing...

I investigate whether hedge funds that supply liquidity earn superior returns. Using transaction data, I find that hedge funds following short-term contrarian strategies (i.e., liquidity-suppliers) earn significantly higher returns on their equity trades and holdings. Similarly, using commercial...

We examine the determinants and consequences of broker-hosted investor conferences. We find the number of brokers hosting a firm at conferences is positively related to institutional ownership and intangible assets, consistent with greater client demand for management access among hard-to-value...

We find companies with short, easy to pronounce names have higher breadth of ownership, greater share turnover, and lower transaction price impacts. The relation is stronger among small firms and is consistent with name fluency affecting investor recognition. Fluent company names also translate...

Crowdsourcing — when a task normally performed by employees is outsourced to a large network of people via an open call — is making inroads into the investment research industry. We shed light on this new phenomenon by examining the value of crowdsourced earnings forecasts. Our sample...

Non-deal roadshows (NDRs) are private meetings between management and institutional investors, typically organized by analysts. We find that around NDRs, local institutional investors trade heavily and profitably, while retail trading is significantly less informative. Analysts who sponsor NDRs...