Using a unique proprietary account-level trading dataset in China, we investigate how active information acquisition alleviates price-based return comovement, a typical anomaly in stock splits. We find that: 1) individual trading drives the comovement and the trading correlation between split stocks and the low-price portfolio increases significantly after splits; 2) individuals can learn the firm fundamentals through information acquisition, which effectively alleviates their categorized bias; and 3) the role of information acquisition is more significant in environments characterized by greater uncertainty. Our results are robust to different specifications and alternative measures. Taken together, this paper emphasizes the important role of information acquisition in alleviating behavioral bias and improving decision-making.

We examine the improvements in forecast accuracy that result from analysts' visits to listed companies. We find that company visits significantly enhance the accuracy of the analysts' earnings forecasts for those companies. The benefit from company visits is more pronounced for companies that are more neglected or less accessible and for brokerage firms that face less pressure for optimistic forecasts from buy‐side clients. Our results are robust and remain significant after controlling for endogeneity and selection bias. Overall, our findings show that private interactions with company management provide analysts with an informational advantage and suggest that company visits facilitate the mosaic approach to information acquisition.

Using CEOs' early-life experience during China's Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) to distinguish the trust level of CEOs, we employ a difference-in-differences identification strategy to show that the CEO's trust level exhibits significantly positive impacts on corporate innovation. We then use an alternative dataset from the survey of the Chinese Enterprise Survey System in 2000 to measure the trust at the firm level and subsequently achieve highly consistent findings. We further demonstrate that the substitution effect between informal and formal institutions also exists in relation to the impact of trust on innovation. Trust plays a more important role in promoting innovation when formal institutions are lacking. Overall, this study enriches our understanding on the effects of the CEO's trust level on corporate innovation and provides a micro-level evaluation of China's Cultural Revolution in the long run.