FinTech lending—known for using big data and advanced technologies—promised to break away from the traditional credit scoring and pricing models. Using a comprehensive dataset of FinTech personal loans, our study shows that loan rates continue to rely heavily on conventional credit scores,...

Textbook theory assumes that firm managers maximize the net present value of future cash flows. But when you ask them, the people running large public corporations say that they are maximizing something else entirely: earnings per share (EPS). Perhaps this is a mistake. No matter. We take...

We study the long-run outcomes associated with hedge funds' compensation structure. Over a 22-year period, the aggregate effective incentive fee rate is 2.5 times the average contractual rate (i.e., around 50% instead of 20%). Overall, investors collected 36 cents for every dollar earned on...

The interplay between investors' demand and providers' incentives has shaped the evolution of exchange-traded funds (ETFs). While early ETFs invest in broad-based indexes and therefore offered diversification at low cost, later products track niche port- folios and charge high fees. Strikingly,...

Acquisition announcement returns are widely considered market-based assessments of value creation. Unfortunately, the data do not support this conjecture. We show that commonly used and new measures of realized acquisition outcomes are correlated among themselves, though derived from different...

We show that mutual fund ratings generate correlated demand that creates systematic price fluctuations. Mutual fund investors chase fund performance via Morningstar ratings. Until June 2002, funds pursuing the same investment style had highly correlated ratings. Therefore, rating-chasing...

Using 14,800 forecasts of one-year S&P 500 returns made by Chief Financial Officers over a 12-year period, we track the individual executives who provide multiple forecasts to study how their beliefs evolve dynamically. While CFOs’ return forecasts are systematically unbiased, their confidence...

All of asset-pricing theory currently stems from one key assumption: price equals expected discounted payoff. And much of what we think we know about discount rates comes from studying a particular kind of expected payoff: the earnings forecasts in analyst reports. Researchers typically access...