We use trade-level data to examine the role of actively managed funds (AMFs) in earnings news dissemination. We find that AMFs are drawn to, and participate disproportionately more in, earnings announcements (EAs) that include bundled managerial guidance. When the two pieces of news are directionally inconsistent, AMFs trade in the direction of future guidance rather than current earnings. AMFs exhibit an ability to discern, and adapt their trading to, the bias in bundled guidance. While AMF trades at EAs are generally more profitable than their non-EA trades, this result reverses when guidance bias is extreme. Overall, we find that increased AMF trading during EAs leads to faster price adjustment. Collectively, these findings suggest that AMFs are sophisticated processors of bundled earnings news, and their trading generally improves market price discovery.

This study investigates the value of auditor industry specialization. In the first step, we use a discrete choice model to derive the first-order demand for auditor industry specialization. Our results reveal that clients have a general preference for auditor industry specialization, relating to both audit firm and audit office specialization. We observe that specializations at the audit firm and audit office level are substitutes. We also find that larger, more complex clients have a stronger demand for industry specialization at the audit office level. In the second step, we use the results from the discrete choice model to quantify the value of auditor industry specialists for clients. We find the overall value of industry specialization aggregated across all clients is 5.2 million USD (0.36 percent of audit fees) and that industry specialization at the firm (office) level is decisive for auditor choice in 4 percent (6 percent) of all cases.

Disclosure is of fundamental interest to accounting research. When the sign/magnitude of disclosed news is unclear, the information in disclosure events is inferred using the ratio of return volatilities during event and non-event windows (Beaver 1968). We show that return noise due to microstructure frictions and mispricing affects this ratio, and that effect is comparable to or exceeds that of information content. We use the SEC's Tick Size Pilot program to confirm the causal effect of return noise on the ratio, and to evaluate alternative ways to control for it. The most promising approach is to use the difference between, rather than the ratio of, return volatilities during event and non-event windows. We illustrate its benefits by showing how it alters prior inferences regarding time-series and cross-sectional variation in information content as well as changes in the information content of earnings announcements around the 2004 amendments to Form 8-K filings.