We exploit differences in institutional and macroeconomic environments to shed light on what drives variation in the aggregate earnings-returns relation over time within the U.S. and across countries. We find that both intertemporal and cross-country variation in the aggregate earnings-returns...

The large number of management guidance withdrawals during the COVID-19 pandemic has attracted considerable attention from the media, investors, and regulators. This study analyzes the determinants and consequences of such withdrawals. We find that guidance withdrawals are due to economic...

The large number of management guidance withdrawals during the COVID-19 pandemic has attracted considerable attention from the media, investors, and regulators. This study analyzes the determinants and consequences of such withdrawals. We find that guidance withdrawals are due to economic...

We investigate a sample of 50 firm events, identified in the Global Research Analysts Settlement, in which analysts were discovered to have acted misleadingly ex-post. In this setting, analysts' incentives caused them to issue public disclosures that differed from their private beliefs. We...

Our study documents a “Lemons” market failure of Chinese firms listed in the US in 2011 and a subsequent rebound by 2013. Our tests reveal that there was little difference in ex ante observable characteristics of fraudulent and non-fraudulent Chinese firms listed in the US prior to 2011...

This paper uses a unique transaction-level fund trading dataset to evaluate institutional investors' trading performance. Our research design follows a two-step procedure. In the first stage, we identify funds that heavily sold shares in firms before their public revelation of stock option...

Practitioners have long criticized risk-factor disclosures in the 10-K as generic and boilerplate. In response, regulators emphasize the importance of being specific. By using a computing algorithm, this paper establishes a new measure (Specificity) to quantify the level of specificity of firms'...

We study the behavior of short sellers as informed market participants and examine potential sources of their information. Using a newly available dataset with high-frequency short sales data, we find evidence of significant increases in short sales immediately prior to large insider sales, but...