Portfolio diversification of firms' controlling owners influences their firms' capital investment. Empirically, the effect of owners' portfolio diversification on their firms' investment levels is positive for publicly-traded firms and tends to be negative for privately-held ones. These findings...

We find that investors are fixated on analysts' consensus outputs (earnings forecasts, recommendations, and forecast dispersion), which can be inferior signals compared to the corresponding outputs provided by high-quality analysts, especially when a large number of high-quality analysts follow...

Passively managed index funds now hold over 30% of U.S. equity fund assets; this shift raises fundamental questions about monitoring and governance. We show that, relative to active funds, index funds are less effective monitors: (a) they are less likely to vote against firm management on...

Using a new dataset of corporate voting-rights from 1971 to 2015, we find that young dual-class firms trade at a premium and operate at least as efficiently as young single-class firms. As dual-class firms mature, their valuation declines, and they become less efficient in their margins,...

Hundreds of equity market intelligence FinTechs have formed in the last decade. We assemble novel data to describe their capabilities, users, and consequences. Our data suggest that these FinTechs: (i) aggregate many data sources, including nontraditional ones (e.g., Twitter, blogs), and...

We examine the nature of information contained in insider trades prior to corporate events. Insiders' net buying increases before open market share repurchase announcements and decreases before seasoned equity offers. Higher insider net buying is associated with better post-event operating...

Using the introduction of high-speed rail as exogenous shocks to costs of information acquisition, we show that reductions in information-acquisition costs lead to a significant increase in information production and improvement in output quality, evidenced by higher frequency of analysts...

Using the introduction of high-speed rail (HSR) as an exogenous shock to costs of information acquisition, we show that reductions in information-acquisition costs lead to (i) a significant increase in information production, evidenced by a higher frequency of analysts visiting portfolio firms,...

We develop a novel firm-level measure of cybersecurity risk using textual analysis of cybersecurity-risk disclosures in corporate filings. The measure successfully identifies firms extensively discussing cybersecurity risk in their 10-K, displays intuitive relations with quantitative measures of...

Using textual analysis and comparing cybersecurity-risk disclosures of firms that were hacked to others that were not, we propose a novel firm-level measure of cybersecurity risk for all US-listed firms. We then examine whether cybersecurity risk is priced in the cross-section of stock returns....