Privately informed about firm fundamentals, corporate insiders detect activism-motivated trades better than other traders. This article solves the model of this novel form of insider trading motivated by noninsider information and presents empirical evidence. Corporate insiders preserve their ownership (restraining from selling or buying more) before activist interventions go public to benefit from price appreciation and to defend their private benefits of control. Surveillance technology facilitates response to predisclosure activist trading, especially when positive information about firm fundamentals is absent, supporting the mechanism that insiders attribute order flows to activist interest when speculation on fundamentals can be ruled out.

Prior research has pointed to differences in organizational capital as a reason for the persistent performance discrepancies among otherwise similar firms. In this paper, we develop and validate a new measure of organizational capital. Based on over a million crowd‐sourced employee reviews scraped from Glassdoor, we construct the measure of organizational capital at the firm‐year level using the word embedding model and ChatGPT‐generated synthetic reviews. Our measure varies over time in accordance with macro trends, and differs both across and within firms, reflecting firm heterogeneity and major internal changes. We validate our measure by testing empirical predictions of the properties of organizational capital discussed in prior literature. Our findings suggest that this measure captures a slowly evolving intangible asset that is significantly associated with firm performance and top management's influence, aligning with the conceptualization of organizational capital by Dessein and Prat. We further showcase applications of our measure in accounting, economics, finance, and management literature. Taken together, the paper provides implications for various stakeholders who are interested in assessing and managing firms' organizational capital.

We propose a framework to assess the decision-usefulness of heterogeneous disclosure practices that managers use to convey information to market participants. We illustrate an application of our framework to non-GAAP earnings, management earnings guidance, and earnings conference calls. We first identify key quality attributes for each disclosure practice and then develop a list of quality metrics that we apply to a small pilot sample. We focus on metrics that are easily measured in real time and discuss the practical challenges of conducting assessments of disclosure quality at the firm-quarter-disclosure level. Our descriptive analysis provides preliminary insights into whether and how voluntary disclosure quality varies across firms and highlights the interconnectedness of these disclosure practices. We discuss future research opportunities to expand and fine-tune the application of the framework to develop a comprehensive disclosure quality assessment.

During the 2020–2021 “AAPI Hate,” mutual funds led by female managers perceived as East Asian underperformed relative to other female managers. This effect is stronger in states with higher anti-Asian animus, among more actively managed funds, and when these managers hold sole or senior roles. Factors concurrent with COVID-19, including childcare challenges, concerns for overseas families, marketplace and workplace discrimination, and exposure to the Chinese economy, cannot explain the effect. Underperformance is traceable to poor stock picking due to impairments in generating private information. Racial-ethnic animosity, even outside workplace or marketplace, hinders productivity and decision-making in high-skill professions.