We examine the impact of task-oriented speech (TOS) on market participants’ ability to process new information, where TOS quantifies a more direct method of communication. Focusing on a widely publicized information event, conference calls, we show that greater TOS is associated with lower ex-post total and idiosyncratic volatility and abnormal trading volume, even after controlling for linguistic characteristics, hard versus soft information, industry effects, and ex-ante implied volatility. TOS also impacts financial analysts: forecast error, forecast dispersion and disagreement are lower during the subsequent quarter. Overall, greater use of TOS increases the ability of financial markets to efficiently evaluate new information.

We examine the information content of off-exchange retail order flow relative to off-exchange institutional and on-exchange order flow. We use alternative sources of retail order identification and account for the fact that market opacity affects the order routing choices of both institutions and the brokers who sell retail orders. After controlling for volume effects, we find that retail order flow is more informed than off-exchange institutional order flow. Off-exchange price discovery comes mostly from retail order flow. However, on days with greater Robinhood activity, the information content of retail order flow drops. Our results reconcile some mixed findings in this literature.

Nonlinearities can arise in international investment factors because of a pecking order in barriers. When direct barriers are severe, improvements in governance factors such as rule of law and expropriation risk can increase investment. Only when severe barriers are ameliorated can factors such as firm-specific information, transaction costs and hedging motives become more important. Evidence from unconditional quantile regressions provides support for a pecking order hypothesis, as we find that investment factors vary across the distribution. Specifically, our empirical results indicate that access to basic information is important everywhere, governance and familiarity matter where barriers are high, roles for information and hedging motives become more apparent where barriers are moderate, and where there are no barriers small improvements in governance have little effect on investment. Going forward, analysis should incorporate nonlinearities inherent in cross-border barriers and investment.

Effective risk management in pension funds requires the use of appropriate long-term risk and performance indicators. However, Defined Contribution (DC) pension plans currently rely on short-term metrics that don't align with the retirement income goals of beneficiaries. Against this backdrop, we introduce a funding ratio measure for DC plans defined as the plan assets divided by accrued benefits derived from any given (defined) stream of contributions. The funding ratio's denominator is the present value of the total retirement income achievable if all contributions had been invested in fully amortizing fixed-income portfolios called retirement bonds. We also use the retirement bonds to introduce a class of target-income strategies that can effectively reduce income risk as retirement approaches, but also secure minimum funding ratio levels. These simple asset allocation rules strongly dominate the standard target-date fund strategies routinely used by DC plans, in terms of retirement outcomes for beneficiaries.