The real side of the high-volume return premium
Management Science2022
We investigate whether shocks to trading volume of a stock contain information about future corporate investment activity; an unexplored prediction of the link between the high-volume return premium and the Merton (1987) investor recognition hypothesis. Using a q-theory model of corporate investment as a framework, we document a positive relation between abnormal trading volume around earnings announcements and future investment expenditures. The relation persists across quarterly and annual horizons and, consistent with theory, is concentrated among firms with high financing constraints.
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Unexpected Distractions and Investor Attention to Corporate Announcements
Review of Accounting Studies2022
We investigate whether and to what extent distractions affect investors' reactions to firm announcements. We use a daily news pressure index as a proxy for the presence of potential investor distraction. Since breaking news captured by this index is largely unpredictable and unrelated to investors' valuation decisions, our research design offers a unique opportunity to examine investor attention in the absence of strategic timing of announcements by managers. We examine a broad set of corporate announcements to further explore how investor attention varies with announcement type. Using overall trading and Google search volume as measures of investor attention, we find that investors are susceptible to distraction in their reactions to corporate announcements.
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Hedging on the Hill: Does political hedging reduce firm risk?
Management Science2022
We examine whether firms' political hedging activities are effective at mitigating political risk. Focusing on the risk induced by partisan politics, we measure political hedging as the degree to which firms' political connections are balanced across Republican and Democratic candidates. We find that greater political hedging is associated with reduced stock return volatility, particularly during periods of higher policy uncertainty. Similarly, greater political hedging is associated with reduced crash risk, investment volatility, and earnings volatility.
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Partisanship, Political Institutions, and Debt Issues
Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization2018
We investigate the effect of gubernatorial partisanship on municipal bond issues in the United States using a regression discontinuity design. Our unique dataset of individual bond issues allows us to precisely measure the issuing behavior of different entity types—states, state authorities, and localities—and examine how the response of debt issues to gubernatorial partisanship varies across jurisdictions. The election of Democratic governors results in higher levels of debt issuance, with an annual per capita increase of approximately $73–$147 in states that lack debt referenda requirements. In states with debt referenda requirements, the estimated per capita annual effect of a Democratic governor is approximately $23–$28.
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Is There a Dark Side to Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs)? An Information Perspective
Review of Accounting Studies2017
We examine whether an increase in ETF ownership is accompanied by a decline in pricing efficiency for the underlying component securities. Our tests show an increase in ETF ownership is associated with: (1) higher trading costs (bid-ask spreads and market liquidity); (2) an increase in “stock return synchronicity”; (3) a decline in “future earnings response coefficients”; and (4) a decline in the number of analysts covering the firm. Collectively, our findings support the view that increased ETF ownership can lead to higher trading costs and lower benefits from information acquisition. This combination results in less informative security prices for the underlying firms.
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Volatility forecasting using financial statement information
The Accounting Review2015
This paper examines whether financial statement information can predict future realized volatility incremental to the volatility implied by option market prices. Prior research establishes that option-implied volatility is a biased estimator of future realized volatility. I use an analytical framework to identify accounting-based drivers of equity returns volatility. My main hypothesis is accounting-based drivers can be used to forecast future volatility incremental to either past volatility or the market’s expectation of future volatility quantified as option-implied volatility. I confirm this empirically and show that my findings are robust to the measurement of option-implied volatility using either a model-free approach or the Black-Scholes model. I also document abnormal returns to a option-based trading strategy that takes a long (short) position in firms with financial statement information indicative of high (low) future volatility.
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Disclosure and lawsuits ahead of IPOs
The Accounting Review2023
We examine whether IPO registration disclosures expose firms to greater nonshareholder litigation risk. Using hand-collected data on lawsuits initiated at federal and state courts against IPO firms, we show that firms that submit their IPO registration statement with the SEC publicly experience a 16% increase in litigation risk between the registration filing and issuance date. Consistent with the public filing of the registration driving this heightened litigation risk, firms that file their registration confidentially under the JOBS Act do not experience such an increase in litigation risk. The effects of confidential filing are concentrated among business-initiated lawsuits, intellectual property/ contract lawsuits, and potentially meritless lawsuits. We find no disproportionate increase in post-IPO lawsuits for confidential filers, suggesting that withholding information during the IPO registration period mitigates litigation risk.
