We examine whether and how German and US investment professionals use corporate social responsibility (hereafter, CSR) information when making personal investment decisions and recommendations to clients. Using an experiment, we find that both German and US investment professionals use CSR...

Does textual complexity affect attention and market outcomes? I conduct a global field experiment with Seeking Alpha that randomly assigns to investors different titles for the same news article. Investors are less likely to open the articles when titles are more complex---scored quantitatively...

We study whether social media can play a negative information role by impeding price discovery in the presence of highly speculative rumors. We focus on merger rumors, where most do not materialize. We find that merger rumors accompanied by greater Twitter activity elicit greater immediate...

Prior literature suggests that the zero-earnings discontinuity is caused by earnings management. This makes sense if investors are naíve. We test for the possibility of investor naíveté and find that they are aware of firms performing earnings management around zero reported earnings and that...

Consensus analyst target prices are widely available online at no cost to investors. In this paper we consider whether these consensus target prices are informative for predicting future returns. We find that when considered in isolation, consensus target prices are not generally informative...

This study examines the accounting information uncertainty effects on corporate credit risk from the perspective of real earnings management (RM) activities by investigating 9,565 American bond observations from year 2001 to 2008. The main results show that the volatilities of RM activities...

Fair value refers to current values as the backbones of accounting measurements. Current value follows the efficient financial market (EFM) hypothesis - which abstracts away from economic realization - as guidance for the financial market investment process through ignorance and hazard. This...

In response to the increasing use of computer programs to process firm disclosures, this registered report develops a new measure of “scriptability” that reflects computerized, rather than human, information processing costs. We validate our measure using SEC filing-derived data from prior...

Most 10-K filings include non-informative innovation-related words. This study finds that Textual Emphasis on Innovation (TEI) is consistent with an impression strategy that the firm intends to focus on the long term, and this impression is trustworthy. TEI is positively associated with a...

Using comment streams on Seeking Alpha articles, we examine whether interacting on social media increases or moderates the extremeness of investors’ opinions. Unlike some findings from political science that show social media increases extremeness of opinions, we find that interaction on...