A significant portion of information shared in earnings calls is conveyed through verbal communication by corporate managers. However, quantifying the extent of new information provided by managers poses challenges due to the unstructured nature of human language and the difficulty in gauging...

Relative to wealthier school districts, less wealthy districts have difficulty obtaining municipal bond market funding. When a district issues more bonds to finance education infrastructure, it experiences improvements in both test scores and home prices. Yet, for each standard deviation...

As fiduciaries, Registered Investment Advisers (RIAs) must place client interests ahead of their own. Many fiduciaries are dual-registered as brokers (DRs) and have potential conflicts of interest including revenue sharing from mutual funds, receiving asset-based fees and transaction-based...

Using hedge fund indices representing eight different styles, we find strong evidence of contagion within the hedge fund sector: controlling for a number of risk factors, the average probability that a hedge fund style index has extreme poor performance (lower 10% tail) increases from 2% to 21%...

Hedge fund activists transfer relevant prior work experience to their activism campaigns. Categorizing activists based on past employment at investment banks (generalists), private equity or special situations partnerships (specialists), or other firms (non-financial experts), we relate...

When facing hedge fund activists, target firms often fight back. Targets with agency problems and those confronting the threat of investor coordination frequently engage in hostile resistance by implementing governance changes associated with managerial entrenchment. The market negatively...

Shareholder value creation from hedge fund activism occurs primarily by influencing takeover outcomes for targeted firms. Controlling for selection decisions, activist interventions substantially increase the probability of a takeover offer. Third-party bids for targets have higher returns,...

Using data for the period 1994-2013, we examine the return and risk-taking behavior of hedge funds having at least one female portfolio manager and funds that have all female portfolio managers. Funds with all female managers perform no differently than all male-managed funds and have similar...

During the subprime crisis, the Federal Reserve introduced several emergency liquidity programs as supplements to the discount window: TAF, PDCF, and TSLF. Using data on loans to large commercial banks and primary dealers, we find that the programs were used by relatively few institutions and...