Most financial professionals recognize that share repurchases, all other things equal, should increase a firm's stock price and earnings per share. Our goal is to provide financial executives, investment analysts, and shareholders with a practical understanding of the accounting and financial...

Public attention to a firm may provide valuable monitoring, but it may also have a dark side by constraining management’s decisions and distracting it. We use inclusion in the S&P 500 index as a positive shock to public attention. Media coverage, Google searches, SEC downloads, SEC comment...

In this paper I examine the relation between profits from book-to-market strategies and momentum strategies. Specifically, I test two time-series hypotheses which are not mutually exclusive, but do have opposite predictions for subsequent momentum profits. First, if periods of large...

I construct a novel measure of differences of opinion based on investor holdings data which isolates the type of disagreement that is theoretically predicted to affect prices when assets are bundled or unbundled. Empirically, using the setting of corporate spin-offs, I show that differences of...

Information processing filters out the noise in data but it takes time. Hence, low precision signals are available before high precision signals. To capture this feature, we develop a model of securities trading in which investors can acquire signals (about future cash flows) of increasing...

We study the nature and impact of ratings changes for individual stocks provided to investors by Morningstar, Inc. Morningstar's recommendations follow negative momentum for upgrades and positive momentum for downgrades. When ratings change, upgraded stocks experience positive abnormal returns,...

Using the first and recently available universe of dark pool trading in the U.S. from FINRA, we document trading patterns around scheduled and unscheduled corporate information events. We find that there is more trading in dark pools in the week of earnings announcement as well as analyst...