The computation of implied cost of capital (ICC) is constrained by the lack of analyst forecasts for half of all firms. Hou, van Dijk, and Zhang (2012, HVZ) present a cross-sectional model to generate forecasts in order to compute ICC. However, the forecasts from the HVZ model perform worse than...

Prior research examines how companies exploit Twitter in communicating with investors, how information in tweets by individuals may be used to predict the stock market as a whole, and how Twitter activity relates to earnings response coefficients (the beta from the returns/earnings regression)....