In frictionless markets dividends are irrelevant to firm value (Miller and Modigliani 1961), but in practice we propose that they affect valuation and stewardship, roles traditionally filled by accounting information. Using a variety of econometric methods to control for differences between...

Yes. We show that dividend changes contain information about highly persistent changes in future economic income. Three methodological differences lead us to different conclusions from the extant literature: (i) we use an “event window approach” to cleanly delineate earnings after dividend...

We identify a novel bias in analyst forecasts, after revision bias, which we identify by examining an analyst's reports after his final earnings forecast of the quarter. We document that (i) qualitative predictions from the text of reports, (ii) share price target revisions, and (iii) revisions...

Prior to investing in a firm, fund managers must evaluate it. This tilts funds’ future portfolio positions toward former portfolio investments, as the past awareness of the firm decreases the cost of evaluating it in the future. We find that firms with many former investors experience...