This paper provides evidence that managers adjust firm advertising, in part, to attract investor attention and influence short-term stock returns. First, I show that increased advertising spending is associated with a contemporaneous rise in retail buying and abnormal stock returns, and is followed by lower future returns. Second, I document a significant increase in advertising spending prior to insider sales and a significant decrease in the subsequent year. Additional analyses suggest that the inverted V-shaped pattern in advertising spending around insider sales is most consistent with managers' opportunistically adjusting firm advertising to exploit the temporary return effect to their own benefit.

[I propose and test a capital-flow-based explanation for some well-known empirical regularities concerning return predictability—the persistence of mutual fund performance, the "smart money" effect, and stock price momentum. First, I construct a measure of demand shocks to individual stocks by aggregating flow-induced trading across all mutual funds, and document a significant, temporary price impact of such uninformed trading. Next, given that mutual fund flows are highly predictable, I show that the expected part of flow-induced trading positively forecasts stock and mutual fund returns in the following year, which are then reversed in subsequent years. The main findings of the paper are that the flow-driven return effect can fully account for mutual fund performance persistence and the smart money effect, and can partially explain stock price momentum.]

We explore a new mechanism by which investors take correlated shortcuts and present evidence that managers—using sales management—take advantage of these shortcuts. Specifically, we exploit a regulatory provision wherein a firm's primary industry is determined by the highest sales segment. Exploiting this regulation, we provide evidence that investors classify operationally nearly identical firms as starkly different depending on their placement around this sales cutoff. Moreover, managers appear to exploit this by manipulating sales to be just over the cutoff in favorable industries. Further evidence suggests that managers engage in activities to realize large, tangible benefits from this opportunistic action.

This paper provides evidence that managers adjust firm advertising, in part, to attract investor attention and influence short-term stock returns. First, I show that increased advertising spending is associated with a contemporaneous rise in retail buying and abnormal stock returns, and is followed by lower future returns. Second, I document a significant increase in advertising spending prior to insider sales and a significant decrease in the subsequent year. Additional analyses suggest that the inverted V-shaped pattern in advertising spending around insider sales is most consistent with managers' opportunistically adjusting firm advertising to exploit the temporary return effect to their own benefit. © The Author 2014.

[We show that Treasury security prices in the secondary market decrease significantly in the few days before Treasury auctions and recover shortly thereafter, even though the time and amount of each auction are announced in advance. These results are linked to dealers' limited risk-bearing capacity and end-investors' imperfect capital mobility, highlighting the important role of frictions even in very liquid financial markets. Our results imply a hidden issuance cost to the U.S. Department of the Treasury, estimated to be 9 to 18 bps of the auction size, or over half a billion dollars for the issuance size in 2007.]

This paper proposes and tests an investment-flow based explanation for three empirical findings on return predictability -the persistence of mutual fund performance, the "smart money" effect, and stock price momentum. Since mutual fund managers generally scale up or down their existing positions in response to investment flows, and the portfolios of funds receiving capital generally differ from those that lose capital, investment flows to mutual funds can cause significant demand shocks in individual stocks. Moreover, given that mutual fund flows are largely predictable from past fund performance and past flows, this paper further establishes that flow-induced price pressure is predictable. Finally, this paper shows that such flow-based return predictability can fully account for mutual fund performance persistence and the "smart money" effect, and can partially explain stock price momentum.

We propose a novel measure of arbitrage activity to examine whether arbitrageurs can have a destabilizing effect on the stock market. We focus on stock price momentum, a classic example of a positive-feedback strategy that our theory predicts can be destabilizing. Our measure, dubbed comomentum, is the high-frequency abnormal return correlation among stocks on which a typical momentum strategy would speculate. When comomentum is low, momentum strategies are stabilizing, reflecting an underreaction phenomenon that arbitrageurs correct. When comomentum is high, the returns on momentum stocks strongly revert, reflecting prior overreaction from crowded momentum trading that pushes prices away from fundamentals.

We explore a new mechanism by which investors take correlated shortcuts and present evidence that managers—using sales management—take advantage of these shortcuts. Specifically, we exploit a regulatory provision wherein a firm's primary industry is determined by the highest sales segment. Exploiting this regulation, we provide evidence that investors classify operationally nearly identical firms as starkly different depending on their placement around this sales cutoff. Moreover, managers appear to exploit this by manipulating sales to be just over the cutoff in favorable industries. Further evidence suggests that managers engage in activities to realize large, tangible benefits from this opportunistic action.

We show that Treasury security prices in the secondary market decrease significantly in the few days before Treasury auctions and recover shortly thereafter, even though the time and amount of each auction are announced in advance. These results are linked to dealers' limited risk-bearing capacity and end-investors' imperfect capital mobility, highlighting the important role of frictions even in very liquid financial markets. Our results imply a hidden issuance cost to the U.S. Department of the Treasury, estimated to be 9 to 18 bps of the auction size, or over half a billion dollars for the issuance size in 2007.