Asset pricing models implicitly assume that firm characteristics are context-free. At the same time, companies provide a substantial narrative context that helps investors to put numeric information in perspective. Management may discuss non-quantitative factors that influence performance, such...

Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT can fundamentally change the way investors process information. We probe the economic usefulness of these tools in summarizing complex corporate disclosures using the stock market as a laboratory. The unconstrained summaries are dramatically shorter, often by...

Does the context surrounding the numbers in financial statements help investors to interpret these numbers? Answering this question empirically presents a major challenge. We leverage recent advances in natural language processing to study the role of context in the interpretation of numeric...

We use equity portfolio allocation decisions to study the relevance of accounting information for investors’ demand for stocks. We document significant heterogeneity across investors in the demand relevance of profitability measures and income statement components. Although operating profit...

Transparency of quality in the healthcare sector primarily aims to facilitate patients' care decisions, however, it also provides useful information to competing healthcare providers. We study how competitors respond to increased transparency about rivals' quality by exploiting a regulatory...

We take advantage of a new measure of political risk (Hassan et al. (2019)) to study the effects of firmlevel political risk on private debt markets. First, we use panel data tests and exploit the redrawing of US congressional districts to uncover plausibly exogenous variation in firm-level...

Do accruals-based earnings provide better information about future operating cash flows than do operating cash flows themselves, as predicted by the Financial Accounting Standards Board's conceptual framework (FASB 1978)? While this is a foundational issue in accounting, because it addresses the...

We propose an empirical measure of firms' metering problems. We build on the notion that metering problems are reflected in the intensity with which firms apply Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) to map economic transactions onto financial statements. We develop an algorithm to...

We examine the effect of firm-level political risk on debt markets. While prior research relies mainly on economy-wide proxies for political risk, Hassan et al. (2019) suggests that a substantial amount of political risk plays out at the firm-level. We use their measure to show that...

We show that financial shocks to lenders affect the composition of covenants in new debt contracts in a way that cannot be explained by borrower fundamentals. Using two distinct measures of lender-specific shocks—defaults in a lender's corporate loan portfolio that occur outside the borrower's...