We document that firms making straight and convertible debt offerings during 1975-1989 substantially underperformed samples of non-issuing control firms matched on size and book-to-market ratio. This evidence of long-run underperformance following debt offerings is not consistent with the...

This study examines transactions in stocks during the thirty trading days prior to earnings announcements. Using two methodologies, we find evidence of informed trading for initiators of large transactions (presumably institutions) but not for initiators of small transactions (presumably...

We examine gender usage in a sample of 89,195 annual reports filed with the SEC during 1996-2013. We find that, after adjusting for other effects, annual reports by younger firms use proportionally more female-linked words than documents created by older, more mature companies. This finding...

A commonly-used platform to assess the tone of business documents in the extant accounting and finance literature is Diction. We argue that Diction is inappropriate for gauging the tone of financial disclosures. About 83% of the Diction optimistic words and 70% of the Diction pessimistic words...

Measuring the extent to which a firm is financially constrained is critical in assessing capital structure. Extant measures of financial constraints focus on macro firm characteristics such as age and size – variables highly correlated with other firm attributes. We parse 10-K disclosures...

Over the past decade, corporate scandals have proliferated. These scandals along with the emergence of the #MeToo movement and Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance (ESG) mandates, have increased the scrutiny of corporations’ ethics culture. How have companies responded in terms of...

We study the profitability of a strategy based on the earnings surprises. First, we attempt to identify variables, in addition to earnings surprise, that will improve our ability to predict post-earnings announcement returns. Second, we test a strategy based on the SUE effect using a...

Do investors quickly and rationally react to the content of oil-related news articles revealing supply and demand information? Our paper creates a novel keyword list of 130 oil-related words and modifiers that enable investors/researchers to measure the information content of oil stories. We...