This article introduces a new holding horizon measure of active management and examines its relation to future risk-adjusted fund performance (alpha). Our measure reveals a wide cross-sectional dispersion in mutual fund investment horizons, and shows that long-horizon funds exhibit positive future long-term alphas by holding stocks with superior long-term fundamentals. Further, stocks largely held by long-horizon funds outperform stocks largely held by short-horizon funds by more than $ 3\% $ annually, adjusted for risk, over the following 5-year period. We also find a clientele effect: to reduce liquidity costs, long-horizon funds attract more long-term investors through share classes that carry load fees.

We document the causal effects of single-name options trading on the absolute level of information content of prices (stock price informativeness) by exploiting the Penny Pilot Program as an exogenous shock to options trading volume. We find that options trading increases underlying stock price informativeness and information acquisition by both option and stock investors, consistent with the framework of Goldstein and Yang (2015). The findings are driven by firms for which options are more important sources of information and firms with more efficiently priced options. Options market introduction in a sample of 25 other economies also leads to higher price informativeness.

Big data on job postings reveal multiple facets of the impact of COVID-19 on corporate hiring. Firms disproportionately cut new hiring for high-skill positions, with financially constrained firms reducing skilled hiring the most. Applying machine learning methods to job-ad texts, we find that firms have skewed their hiring toward operationally-core functions. New positions display greater flexibility regarding schedules and tasks. While job posting levels show signs of recovery starting in late-2020, changes to job descriptions and skill profiles persist through early-2022. Financial constraints amplify these changes, with constrained firms’ new hires witnessing greater adjustments to job roles and employment arrangements.

Exploiting two quasi-natural experiments, we find that firms increase emissions of toxic pollution following decreases in analyst coverage. The effects are stronger for firms with low initial analyst coverage, poor corporate governance, and firms subject to less stringent monitoring by environmental regulators. Decreases in environmental-related questions raised in conference calls, an increased cost of monitoring to institutional shareholders, reductions in pollution abatement investment, and the weakening of internal governance related to environmental performance are channels through which reduced analyst coverage contributes to increases in firm pollution. Our study highlights the monitoring role analysts play in shaping corporate environmental policies.

This article studies the effects of state minimum wage increase on information technology (IT) adoption at the establishment level in the United States. Our results show that treatment establishments on average allocate between $10,328 and $66,808 more per year to their IT budgets during the first 3 years after experiencing significant state minimum wage increases. Additional evidence shows that state minimum wage increases on average lead to an economically small decrease in employment. The estimated employment effect is larger for establishments that have more incentives to automate labor. Our results suggest that establishments adopt technology to countervail increased labor costs.

Using the 2016 U.S. presidential election result as a shock to the expectations about the future regulatory environment, I find that most regulated firms earned approximately 4% higher cumulative abnormal stock returns than least regulated firms during the first 10 trading days after the election. Exploring economic mechanisms, I find evidence consistent with the explanation that more regulations disproportionately harm high-growth firms and allow incumbent firms to extract rents through lower competition and political favoritism. Stock returns are also followed by a shift in firm fundamentals over 3 years after 2016, consistent with the economic mechanisms.

We introduce a novel application of machine learning to compare pooling and servicing agreements (PSAs) that govern commercial mortgage-backed securities. In contrast to the view that the PSA is largely boilerplate text, we document substantial variation across PSAs, both within- and across-underwriters and over time. A part of this variation is driven by differences in loan collateral across deals. Additionally, we find that differences in PSAs are correlated with ex post loan and bond performance. Collectively, our analysis suggests the importance of examining the entire governing document, rather than specific components, when analyzing complex financial securities.

Using three exogenous shocks to ex ante litigation risk, including federal judge ideology and two influential judicial precedents, we find that lower shareholder litigation risk reduces a firm’s propensity to delist from the U.S. stock markets. The effect is at least partially driven by indirect costs of litigation and that being a private firm can significantly reduce the threat of litigation. Overall, the results suggest that mitigating excessive litigation costs for public firms is crucial to ensure the continued vibrancy of the U.S. stock market.

Executives trade more profitably and opportunistically over the course of the tenure of independent directors (IDs). IDs’ increased connections with and hence allegiance to executives are likely the channel through which ID tenure can affect executive trading. Executive opportunism is mitigated by disciplinary factors that include the presence of a firm’s internal trading policy, blockholders, and IDs with legal expertise as well as the risk of shareholder-initiated derivative lawsuits. These results point to an association between long-tenured IDs and weakened corporate governance.

Contrary to leading asset pricing theories, recent empirical evidence indicates that financial markets compensate only short-term equity variance risk. An equilibrium model with generalized disappointment aversion risk preferences and rare events reconciles salient features of the variance term structure. In addition, a calibration explains the variance and skew risk premiums in equity returns and the implied volatility skew of index options while capturing standard moments of fundamentals, equity returns, and the risk-free rate. The key intuition for the results stems from substantial countercyclical risk aversion induced by endogenous variation in the probability of disappointing events in consumption growth.

This article investigates the impact of exchange-traded fund (ETF) ownership on seasoned equity offerings (SEOs). We find that increases to firms’ ETF ownership is positively related to their propensity to conduct an SEO. ETF ownership is also associated with less negative SEO announcement returns, smaller discounts, and better long-run stock returns. Our evidence is consistent with equity issuance following investor demand for stocks driven by greater participation in ETFs, suggesting a possible alternative source of market timing opportunity.

This article studies how industry peers’ stock prices respond when another firm in the industry is acquired by a foreign firm. The average stock price reactions of industry peers in horizontal foreign acquisitions around deal announcements are significantly negative. Peers’ returns are more negative in growing, less specialized, and competitive industries. Moreover, the negative stock price reactions of industry peers are related to future decreases in their operating performance. Overall, these results suggest that foreign acquisitions have strong competitive effects for the industry peers of U.S. target companies.

Recent Delaware Chancery Court decisions that boards are self-interested in setting director compensation have focused scrutiny on the pay-setting process used by corporations. We examine the effect of peer benchmarking on director compensation decisions. Director pay relates positively to peer director pay, and firms paying their directors highly are selected as peers. Moreover, firm performance and board advising performance are positively related to the talent component and are generally unrelated to the self-serving component of the peer pay effect. The evidence indicates that firms use peer benchmarking to justify high compensation mainly to attract talented directors to enhance board quality.

This article examines the severity of the 2008 arbitrage crash in the convertible bond market by estimating how expensive it would have been to liquidate portfolio securities immediately. We consider whether funds actually demanded immediate liquidity or were able to delay trades. Our results indicate that the cost of immediacy was high, but that convertible bond sellers could largely avoid selling at fire sale prices. These results can be explained by dealers recognizing when trades are liquidity-motivated rather than information-based and by a shift to riskless principal trading, allowing dealers to avoid taking bonds into inventory.

We study the effect of credit default swaps (CDSs) on the bond market. Using a comprehensive sample of U.S. corporate bonds, we document that the presence of CDSs significantly increases bond liquidity and reduces yield spreads for investment grade bonds. We show that CDSs influence the bond market by lowering the impact of fire sales of institutional bondholders and facilitating inventory management for bond dealers who absorb fire sale shocks. However, the liquidity provision role of CDSs gets weakened after the CDS Big Bang in 2009, potentially because of the requirement of large upfront payments.