We explore how umpires' racial/ethnic preferences are expressed in their evaluation of Major League Baseball pitchers. Controlling for umpire, pitcher, batter and catcher fixed effects and many other factors, strikes are more likely to be called if the umpire and pitcher match race/ethnicity....

This paper examines the revealed preferences of institutional investors for firm policies. I find that institutional investors are a heterogeneous group as they exhibit systematic differences in terms of the financial and investment policies of their shareholdings. The null hypothesis that the...

One of the most prominent stylized facts in corporate finance is that equity issues tend to follow periods of high stock returns. We document that firms exhibit such timing behavior only in response to high returns that coincide with strong institutional investor demand. When not accompanied by...

Although investors' preference for nearby investments has been widely documented in the literature, there is no apparent consensus on whether local investors have any informational advantage. Analyzing the equity holdings of a large sample of actively managed mutual funds, I find evidence...

We introduce a novel concept of the activeness of internal capital allocations across industries. We derive a measure of this activeness and use it to compare the performance of firms with different capital allocation styles. We find that firms that actively change their capital allocation...

We introduce a novel concept of the activeness of internal capital allocations across industries. We derive a measure of this activeness and use it to compare the performance of firms with different capital allocation styles. We find that firms that actively change their capital allocation...

We examine whether bereavement affects managerial investment decisions in large organizations using the exogenous events of managers' family deaths. We find evidence in separate samples of mutual funds and publicly traded firms that bereaved managers take less risk. Mutual funds managed by...

We propose an Institutional Presence (IP) measure to capture the latent role of non-owner institutional investors who nevertheless may be observing a firm. We employ this measure to examine whether the ‘presence' of institutional investors reduces information asymmetry in the market. Firms in...

This paper investigates how transportation networks shape firms' geographic footprint byreducing information asymmetry associated with distant investments. Exploiting the staggeredexpansions of China's passenger high-speed rail (HSR) network, we document that the amountof intercity investment...