We examine 1984-2018 data and show that the talent or ability of sell-side financial analysts affects a covered firm's information environment—more so than the simple number of analysts covering a firm. We find that while analysts in general produce market and industry-level information,...

In this paper I study the impact of competition in financial markets on incentive to reveal information. In a sample of mutual funds, I find that discretionary portfolio disclosure and advertising related expenses decrease with competition. This is interesting, as one would ordinarily expect...

In this study, we decompose idiosyncratic stock return volatility (IVOL) into uncertainty and residual volatility, and find that the negative IVOL-return relation primarily comes from the uncertainty component. Further analysis indicates that firm uncertainty increases are associated with...