We establish a link between firms managing investors' performance expectations, earnings announcement premia, and cyclical patterns (i.e., seasonalities) in returns. Firms that are more likely to manage expectations toward beatable levels predictably earn lower returns before, and higher returns...

We develop and implement a new measure of information asymmetry among traders. Our measure is based on the intuition that informed traders are more likely than uninformed traders to generate abnormal volume in options or stock markets. We formalize this intuition theoretically and compute the...

We show the cost of trading on negative news, relative to positive news, increases before earnings announcements. Our evidence suggests this asymmetry is due to financial intermediaries reducing their exposure to announcement risks by providing liquidity asymmetrically. This asymmetry creates a...

Using novel earnings calendar data, we show that firms' advanced scheduling of earnings announcement dates foreshadows their earnings news. Firms that schedule later-than-expected announcement dates subsequently announce worse news than those scheduling earlier-than-expected announcement dates....

We examine the information content of option and equity volumes when trade direction is unobserved. In a multimarket symmetric information model, we show that equity short-sale costs result in a negative relation between relative option volume and future firm value. In our empirical tests,...

We show that an activist's reputation is a critical determinant of the success of their campaigns. We model reputation as target managers' belief about the activist's willingness to initiate a proxy fight. Our model indicates reputation, rather than stake size, induces managers to settle without...

We measure the impact of reputation for proxy fighting on investor activism by estimating a dynamic model in which activists engage a sequence of target firms. Our estimation produces an evolving reputation measure for each activist and quantifies its impact on campaign frequency and outcomes....

Using newly-mandated disclosures, we show some fund managers retain a fraction of securities lending income by employing in-house lending agents. In a model with heterogeneous investors, we find this retention leads funds to "reach for lending fees" by overweighting high-fee stocks that...

Kandel and Stambaugh (1996) demonstrate that forecasting variables with weak statistical support in predictive return regressions can exert considerable economic influence on portfolio decisions. Using a Bayesian vector autoregression framework with stochastic volatility in market returns and...