We use a proprietary dataset from a large Swiss retail bank to examine the impact of financial advice on individual investors’ stock trading performance and their behavioral biases. Our data allows us to classify each individual trade as either advised or independent and to compare them in a...

This paper investigates the problem of time stamp errors in the IBES database. We show that IBES did not store the original announcement date of both recommendations and forecasts on U.S. stocks until 2001 and even later for other countries. The announcement date in IBES is often effectively the...

We show that portfolio sorts, as widely used in empirical asset pricing, tend to misattribute cross-sectional return predictability to the firm characteristic underlying the sort. Such misattribution arises if the sorting variable correlates with a firm-specific effect capturing unobservable...

We show that portfolio sorts, as widely used in empirical asset pricing, tend to misattribute cross-sectional return predictability to the firm characteristic underlying the sort. Such misattribution arises if the sorting variable correlates with a firm-specific effect capturing unobservable...

We analyze the valuation effect of board industry experience and channels through which industry experience of outside directors affects firm value. Firms with more experienced outside directors are valued at a premium compared to firms with less experienced outside directors. Additional tests...

We study financial reporting and corporate governance in 216 U.S. companies accused of price fixing by antitrust authorities. We document a range of strategies used by these firms when reporting financial results, including frequent earnings smoothing, segment reclassification, and restatements....

We investigate whether investor reactions to the announcement of a new outside director appointment significantly depend on the director’s experience in the appointing firm’s industry. We use a sample of 385 outside directors appointed to the board of S&P 500 companies from 2008 to 2010. Our...

Exploiting a unique feature of the Clayton Antitrust Act, we analyze how directors holding outside directorships at peer firms affect firm value and performance of financial firms. We find that directors serving simultaneously at horizontally-related firms have a negative impact on firm value...