We find that within-firm base pay inequality is negatively associated with employee morale. Increases in hourly wages improve morale even among high-salaried employees. In contrast, total pay inequality is positively associated with morale. Low base pay (high total pay) inequality corresponds...

CAPM alpha explains hedge fund flows better than alphas from more sophisticated models. This suggests that investors pool together sophisticated model alpha with returns from exposures to traditional (except for the market) and exotic risks. We decompose performance into traditional and exotic...

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...

We study the effects of social media on the informativeness of retail investor trading. Our identification strategy exploits the editorial delay between report submission and publication on Seeking Alpha, a popular crowdsourced investment research platform. We find the ability of retail order...

Prices of the highly liquid S&P500 exchange traded fund (SPY) and the E-mini future (ES) respond to macroeconomic announcement surprises within five milliseconds, with trading intensity increasing over a hundred-fold following the news release. However, profits from trading quickly are...

We find that firms experiencing improvements in crowdsourced employer ratings significantly outperform firms with declines. The return effect is concentrated among reviews from current employees, stronger among early firm reviews, and also stronger when the employee works in the headquarters...

We examine the trades of index funds and other institutions around Samp;P 500 index additions. We find index funds begin rebalancing their portfolios with the announcement of composition changes and do not fully establish their positions until weeks after the effective date. Trading away from...

We find that Robinhood ownership changes are unrelated with future returns, suggesting that zero-commission investors behave as noise traders. We exploit Robinhood platform outages to identify the causal effects of commission-free traders on financial markets. Exogenous negative shocks to...

Retail investors dominate option trading in recent years. Individuals are net purchasers of options, particularly call, short-dated, and out-of-the-money options, although they tend to write long-dated puts. Retail brokerage outages are associated with reduced implied volatility overall, and the...