Individual investors often neglect value-relevant accounting information and instead underperform by trading on technical trends. We investigate the frictions that impede individual investors' use of accounting information, and in particular their costs of monitoring and acquiring accounting...

In 2014, the Associated Press (AP) began using algorithms to write articles about firms' earnings announcements. These “robo-journalism” articles synthesize information from firms' press releases, analyst reports, and stock performance and are widely disseminated by major news outlets a few...

We investigate whether unpleasant environmental conditions affect stock market participants' responses to information events. We draw from psychology research to develop a new prediction that weather-induced negative moods reduce market participants' activity levels. Exploiting geographic...

Fixed effects are ubiquitous in accounting and finance studies, but many new researchers have only a vague understanding of how they function. This manuscript provides plain-English explanations of how fixed effects can eliminate certain omitted variable biases, affect standard errors, and alter...

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...

Credit ratings on many financial instruments failed to accurately portray default risk before the global financial crisis. I find no decline in the performance of corporate credit ratings during or after the crisis, indicating that the failures of ratings on financial instruments were due to...

Using comprehensive data on U.S. corporate bond trades since 2002, we find that retail bond investors over-rely on untimely credit ratings, neglect firm fundamentals, and appear to misunderstand the trade-off between bond risk and yields. Specifically, retail investors appear to select bonds by...