Using actual practice data from U.S. corporate treasury executives, we provide initial evidence of managers' internal estimates of their firms' cost of equity capital (COEC) and extrapolate managers' estimation practices to the broader population of public firms. Our study provides insights into...

Using Yahoo Finance search data, we document that when investors search for investment information they by far and large rely on the information of crowds. The results indicate that this reliance significantly varies across industries, and is most pronounced in firms with greater uncertainty and...

We use Yahoo Finance search to examine the effects of investor attention at earnings announcements. We find that Yahoo Finance search at earnings announcements is a major factor explaining earnings responses and is predictive of subsequent returns. Moreover, we show that other measures of...

There is a seven year period between the time that a country first learns that it has won a bid to host the Olympics to the playing of the games. We investigate whether investors use the Olympics as a category for investment over this time period. We examine two hosting countries: China in 2008...

DeFond, Erkens, and Zhang (2016, hereafter DEZ) provide comprehensive analyses highlighting how random variations in propensity score matching (PSM) design choices affect inferences concerning the existence of the Big 4 auditor effect. The conclusion of DEZ is that Lawrence, Minutti-Meza, and...

We investigate the effects of audit partner rotation among U.S. publicly listed firms, utilizing the fact that audit partners are periodically copied by name in public correspondence between issuers and the SEC. Relative to non-rotation firms, we find no evidence of a change in the frequency of...

This paper illustrates how measurement error (“ME”) in dependent variables not only reduces power but, under common conditions in accounting and finance studies, can lead to statistical biases and erroneous inferences. These confounds exist because ME in accounting-based proxies is typically...

Since 2001, the number of financial statement line items forecasted by analysts and managers that I/B/E/S and FactSet capture in their electronic data feeds has soared. Taking advantage of this rich new data, we find that 11 income statement and two cash flow statement analyst and management...

This study presents a field experiment we conducted in which media articles for a random sample of firms with earnings announcements are promoted to a one percent subset of Yahoo Finance users. The promoted firms have similar fundamental and earnings-news characteristics as control firms, yet we...

We investigate whether media coverage of mega-sports events can have spill-over effects in the stock market. Specifically, we focus on the Olympics and we analyze whether the media attention and hype surrounding the Olympics encourages investors to use the Olympics as a way to classify stocks...