Credit ratings affect firms’ access to capital and investment choices. We show that the identity of the credit analysts covering a firm significantly affects the firm’s rating, comparing ratings for the same firm at the same time across agencies. Analyst effects account for 30% of the within variation in ratings. Moreover, the rating biases of analysts carry through to credit spreads on the rat...

This paper combines a comprehensive sample of intraday firm-level news arrivals with high-frequency price movements of individual stocks, thereby decomposing daily stock returns into news-driven and non-news driven components. Consistent with prior literature, we find that non-news driven return precedes a reversal. For news-driven return, however, we find strong evidence of return continuation...

We explore the implications of a subtle “default” choice that firms make in their regular reporting practices, namely that firms typically repeat what they most recently reported. Using the complete history of regular quarterly and annual filings by U.S. corporations from 1995-2014, we show that when firms make an active change in their reporting practices, this conveys an important signal abou...

Introducing extrapolation bias into a standard one-sector production-based real business cycle model with recursive preferences reconciles salient stylized facts about business cycles (low consumption volatility and high investment volatility relative to output) and financial markets (high equity premium, volatile stock returns, and a low and smooth riskfree rate) with low relative risk aversio...

We find a subtle but substantial bias in a standard measure of the conditional dependence of present outcomes on streaks of past outcomes in sequential data. The mechanism is driven by a form of selection bias, which leads to an underestimate of the true conditional probability of a given outcome when conditioning on prior outcomes of the same kind. The biased measure has been used prominently ...

Article history: Received 28 August 2012 Accepted 22 January 2013 Available online 31 January 2013 Using a sample of 293 IPOs in Hong Kong, we separately measure pre-market and aftermarket sentiments and examine their impact on IPO pricing in a two-stage framework. We find that underwriters only partially adjust offer price to reflect pre-market sentiment and money left on the table is positive...

(i) The number of cases, n, on which the regression is based. (ii) The total number of variables, dependent and independent, in the regression, ðkþ 1Þ. (iii) The number of independent variables in the regression, k. (iv) The means of all kþ 1 variables in the regression, both the independent variables ðx1; x2; . . . ; xkÞ and the dependent variable ðyÞ, which is the ðkþ 1Þth variable: i.e., x1;...