I reexamine whether media articles with substantive editorial content inform the market's reaction to firms' earnings news. Using variation in earnings announcement coverage because of restructuring at The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), my analyses suggest that WSJ earnings articles improve price discovery and increase trading volume at S&P 500 earnings announcements. Additionally, textual analysis suggests media articles that differ more from the firm's earnings release increase trading volume, and that the differences speed up (slow down) price discovery when they corroborate (contradict) the tone of the firm's news. Such high difference articles are slightly longer, are more readable and specific, include more references to the industry and economy, repeat less “stale” news published in previous WSJ articles, and quote more investor and expert sources. Overall, my paper contributes to research on the role of the media in earnings news by providing evidence that journalists' editorial content helps investors understand firms' earnings, instead of simply entertaining or increasing awareness.

We use complaints filed with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to study the interplay between social norms and the effectiveness of consumer protection laws. We find that a higher level of trust in a given location is associated with a lower number of complaints filed against financial institutions in that location. Employing a difference‐in‐differences approach, we further find that, after the establishment of the CFPB, banks in low‐trust areas reduce fees charged to consumers more compared to banks in high‐trust areas. Our results suggest that the threat of consumer complaints to a government agency affects how banks treat their customers, and they shed light on the interaction between informal culture and formal institutions, as well as on stakeholders’ influence in corporate policies.

This paper provides evidence that disclosing corporate bond investors' transaction costs (markups) affects the size of the markups. Until recently, markups were embedded in the reported transaction price and not explicitly disclosed. Without explicit disclosure, investors can estimate their markups using executed transaction prices. However, estimating markups imposes information processing costs on investors, potentially creating information asymmetry between unsophisticated investors and bond‐market professionals. We explore changes in markups after bond‐market professionals were required to explicitly disclose the markup on certain retail trade confirmations. We find that markups decline for trades that are subject to the disclosure requirement relative to those that are not. The findings are pronounced when constraints on investors' information processing capacity limit their ability to be informed about their markups without explicit disclosure.

In early 2017, the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) mandated the disclosure of audit participants, including the lead audit partner and other audit firms participating in the audit (“component auditors”). In this study, we examine whether investors use these disclosures in a way that influences their investment decisions, a primary goal of the PCAOB. Using trading volume, absolute abnormal returns, and bid–ask spreads, we find little evidence of a significant investor response following the disclosure of partner identity or component auditor participation in the first three years of the requirement. We also examine instances where these disclosures are most likely to be informative (e.g., partners associated with restatements or component auditors with PCAOB deficiencies) and find no significant investor response. Taken together, we find little evidence that capital markets respond to partner and component auditor identity in the United States.

Implied equity duration was originally developed to analyze the sensitivity of equity prices to discount rate changes. We demonstrate that implied equity duration is also useful for analyzing the sensitivity of equity prices to pandemic shutdowns. Pandemic shutdowns primarily impact short‐term cash flows, thus they have a greater impact on low‐duration equities. We show that implied equity duration has a strong positive relation to U.S. equity returns and analyst forecast revisions during the onset of the 2020 COVID‐19 shutdown. Our analysis also demonstrates that the underperformance of “value” stocks during this period is a rational response to their lower durations.