Hong and Kacperczyk (2010) document that decreases in analyst competition due to broker mergers encourage analysts to please managers, leading to greater consensus optimism bias. We propose three additional effects of analyst competition. The analyst effort hypothesis suggests that weaker...

This paper systematically examines the impact of nine popular arbitrage costs measures on cross-sectional mispricing based on ten well-known and robust anomalies. We show that binding arbitrage barriers slowly change over time. In early years with few publications documenting return anomalies,...

Based on a difference-in-differences approach, we find strong evidence that the initial enforcement of insider trading laws improves capital allocation efficiency. The effect is concentrated in developed markets and manifests shortly after the enforcement year. Cross-sectional analyses show that...

We explore analysts' earnings forecast data to improve upon one popular disagreement measure — the analyst forecast dispersion measure — proposed by Diether, Malloy, and Scherbina (2002). Our analysis suggests that changes in the standard deviations of forecasted earnings can work as a...

We find that firms with higher cash-to-assets ratios obtain more patents and patent citations for a given amount of research and development expenditures. We propose that large cash reserves increase managerial incentives to innovate by reducing the risk to their career from undertaking...

Generalist CEOs receive higher pay than specialist CEOs. We examine the implications of CEO expertise for the structure of executive compensation. We follow contract theory and predict that information asymmetry induces generalist CEOs to overstate their ability to a larger extent when...

Based on U.S. stock returns from 1973 to 2015, this study found that the asset growth anomaly does not seem to be pervasive and investable. The trading strategy is robust only among a tiny portion of the equity market in terms of both number of stocks and capitalization. In addition to...

This paper provides a mispricing-based explanation for the negative relation between firm-level productivity and stock returns. Investors appear to underprice unproductive firms and overprice productive firms. We find evidence consistent with the speculative overpricing of productive firms...

Enterprise bonds with higher demand of retail investors are traded at significantly higher prices in the exchange market than the same bonds traded by institutional investors in the interbank market in China. The price difference is higher for bonds with higher yield to maturity, lower supply,...

This study comprehensively reexamines the debate over behavioral and rational explanations for the investment effect in an updated sample. We closely follow the previous literature and provide several differences. All our tests include five prominent measures of corporate investment and...