The well-established negative correlation between staggered boards (SBs) and firm value could be due to SBs leading to lower value or a reflection of low-value firms' greater propensity to maintain SBs. We analyze the causal question using a natural experiment involving two Delaware court rulings—separated by several weeks and going in opposite directions—that affected the antitakeover force of SBs. We contribute to the long-standing debate on staggered boards by presenting empirical evidence consistent with the market viewing SBs as leading to lower firm value for the affected firms.

Using a comprehensive list of terrorist attacks over three decades, we find that aggregate investor risk aversion inversely relates to terrorist activity in the United States. A one standard deviation increase in the number of attacks each month leads to a 75.09 million drop in aggregate flows to equity funds and a 56.81 million increase to government bond funds. Tests on alternative channels further suggest that the shift in aggregate risk aversion is driven mainly by an emotional shock rather than changes in wealth or the outside environment. We also investigate possible alternate explanations for reduced flows to risky assets. Our evidence is consistent with a fear-induced increase in aggregate risk aversion.

The correlation between governance indices and abnormal returns documented for 1990–1999 subsequently disappeared. The correlation and its disappearance are both due to market participants' gradually learning to appreciate the difference between good-governance and poor-governance firms. Consistent with learning, the correlation's disappearance was associated with increases in market participants' attention to governance; market participants and security analysts were, until the beginning of the 2000s but not subsequently, more positively surprised by the earning announcements of good-governance firms; and, although governance indices no longer generated abnormal returns during the 2000s, their negative association with firm value and operating performance persisted.

Using a novel dataset, we show that components of firms’ GAAP earnings stemming from ancillary business activities or transitory shocks are significant in frequency and magnitude. These components have grown over time and are dispersed across various sections of the 10-K. Excluding them from GAAP earnings yields a core earnings measure that distinguishes between the recurring and non-recurring components of net income and forecasts future performance. Analysts and market participants are slow to impound these earnings components’ implications, particularly the amounts disclosed in the footnotes. Trading strategies that exploit non-core earnings produce abnormal returns of 8% per year.

After decades of de-prioritizing shareholders’ economic interests and low corporate profitability, Japan introduced the JPX-Nikkei400 in 2014. The index highlighted the country’s “best-run” companies by annually selecting the 400 most profitable of its large and liquid firms. We find that managers competed for inclusion in the index by significantly increasing return on equity (ROE), and they did so at least in part due to their reputational or status concerns. The ROE increase was predominantly driven by improvements in margins, which were in turn partially driven by cutting research and development (R&D) intensity. Our findings suggest that indexes can affect managerial behavior through reputational or status incentives.

Applying a “co-search” algorithm to Internet traffic at the SEC׳s EDGAR website, we develop a novel method for identifying economically related peer firms and for measuring their relative importance. Our results show that firms appearing in chronologically adjacent searches by the same individual (Search-Based Peers or SBPs) are fundamentally similar on multiple dimensions. In direct tests, SBPs dominate GICS6 industry peers in explaining cross-sectional variations in base firms׳ out-of-sample: (a) stock returns, (b) valuation multiples, (c) growth rates, (d) R&D expenditures, (e) leverage, and (f) profitability ratios. We show that SBPs are not constrained by standard industry classification, and are more dynamic, pliable, and concentrated. We also show that co-search intensity captures the degree of similarity between firms. Our results highlight the potential of the collective wisdom of investors — extracted from co-search patterns — in addressing long-standing benchmarking problems in finance.