We document time varying investor sentiment for corporate social responsibility (“CSR”) performance. We show that announcements of CSR activities generate positive abnormal returns during periods when investors place a valuation premium on CSR performance. In addition, we find that firms...

The literature on corporate acquisitions reports a persistent empirical regularity: acquisition announcements by small bidders create greater shareholder value than those by large bidders. This paper presents evidence that greater shareholder gains to small bidders' announcements reflect...

A detailed treatment of aggregation and capital heterogeneity substantially improves the performance of the investment CAPM. Firm-level predicted returns are constructed from firm-level accounting variables and aggregated to the portfolio level to match with portfolio-level stock returns....

Using plausibly exogenous variation in Chinese imports, we provide evidence that firms strategically announce capacity expansions when facing entry threats. We first construct and validate a novel text-based measure of voluntary disclosure that reflects firms' explicit forward-looking statements...

With 5% of U.S. public firms acquired annually, rational expectations perpetually embed a significant portion of acquisition gains into firms' stock prices long before a takeover. We estimate 10% of a typical target's pre-deal price is attributable to general merger anticipation. The unobserved...

Using the split-share structure reform in China as a quasi-natural experiment, we examine the effect of stock liquidity on investment efficiency. Consistent with feedback and incentive theories, investment efficiency increases after the reform but only for under-investing firms. Higher stock...

A large and rapidly growing literature examines the impact of misvaluation on firm policies by using mutual fund outflow-induced price pressure to isolate non-fundamental price variation. I demonstrate that the standard approach to computing outflow-induced price pressure produces a measure that...

Using the split-share structure reform in China, we examine the effect of stock liquidity on investment efficiency. We find that enhanced stock liquidity leads to more efficient investment and the effect is much more pronounced for under-investing firms compared to over-investing firms. We also...

A large proportion of acquisitions results in shareholder wealth destruction. This study examines who is responsible for allowing bad acquisitions. Using a sample of 349 tax-free, stock-for-stock, pooling acquisitions over 1993-2001, the announcement period abnormal returns of acquirers are...

We survey the theory and evidence of behavioral corporate finance, which generally takes one of two approaches. The market timing and catering approach views managerial financing and investment decisions as rational managerial responses to securities mispricing. The managerial biases approach...