A great number of academic papers evaluate the potential for incentive-driven bias in sell-side analysts' earnings forecasts. Yet bias does not necessarily invalidate a forecast, nor does it impinge on its relative quality. We find that analysts' forecasts are optimistic relative to recently...

We collect a unique dataset of Twitter posts to examine the change in investor disagreement around earnings announcements. We find that investors' opinions can either converge (reduced disagreement) or diverge (increased disagreement) around earnings announcements. The convergence and divergence...

202,616 Twitter posts covering 1,082 firms from November 2008 to June 2011 reveal that nonlocal Twitter posters consistently exhibit negative stock return predictability. Since nonlocal posts dominate the sentiment information from social media, this contrarian result highlights the danger of...

202,616 Twitter posts covering 1,082 firms from November 2008 to June 2011 reveal that nonlocal Twitter posters consistently exhibit negative stock return predictability. Since nonlocal posts dominate the sentiment information from social media, this contrarian result highlights the danger of...

The institutional brokerage industry faces an ever-increasing pressure to lower trading costs, which has already driven down average commissions and shifted volume toward low-cost execution venues. However, traditional full-service brokers that bundle execution with services remain a force and...