This research examines how investment experience and financial literacy impact investment‐related judgments. Financial literacy refers to a person's knowledge of fundamental financial concepts. I begin by documenting investors' demographic characteristics and financial literacy using a relatively large sample of participants ( n > 2,000) recruited from Amazon's Mechanical Turk under different categories of investment experience, which I benchmark against national samples of financial capability skills in the United States. I then replicate a sample of three accounting research experiments, varying the type and depth of the underlying accounting issue. Across the three experiments, the data show two main results: First, investment experience strengthens the influence of financial accounting disclosures on participants' investment‐related judgments. Second, financial literacy further strengthens the influence of financial accounting disclosures on investors' (but not noninvestors') judgments. Collectively, these findings suggest that investment experience and financial literacy can help to identify individuals who are more likely to be able and willing to study financial reporting information with reasonable diligence as they form their investment‐related judgments.

I use account-level credit card and term loan data to analyze consumers’ responses to anticipated increases in cash on hand following term loan run-offs. Financial constraints are elicited using past credit card payment behavior and can explain the response of credit card but not term loan expenditure: unconstrained consumers are 23% more likely to finance new durable goods with term loans after the run-off. The results provide evidence of consumers engaging in sequential term loan borrowing.

Employee matching grant schemes are coordination mechanisms that reduce free-riding by socially conscious employee-donors. Matching schemes coupled with lower take-home pay than offered by non-matching firms will survive capital and labor market competition if employee type is not observable and socially conscious employees are more productive or value working together. Matching can enhance employee welfare and raise more for charity without reducing profits. We document that matching firms have higher labor productivity and are more likely to be ranked as one of the “100 Best” employers. The result is robust to managerial entrenchment concerns and is not confined to the high-tech sector.

This paper examines whether managers can reduce the detrimental effects of information overload by spreading out, or temporally smoothing, disclosures. We begin by attempting to identify managerial smoothing. We find that when there are multiple disclosures for the same event date, managers spread the disclosures out over several days. Managers are also more likely to delay a disclosure when there has been a disclosure made within the three days before the event date. Finally, managers are more likely to engage in disclosure smoothing when disclosures are longer, the information environment is more robust, firm information is complex, uncertainty is high, and disclosure news is more positive. Our second set of analyses examines whether there are market benefits to disclosure smoothing. Using two different measures of disclosure smoothing, we find that smoothing is associated with increased liquidity, reduced stock price volatility and increased analyst forecast accuracy.

In markets where sellers are able to price discriminate, individuals pay different prices that may be unobserved by the econometrician. This article considers the structural estimation of a demand and supply model of differentiated products with such price discrimination and limited information on prices taking the form of, e.g., observing list prices from catalogues or average prices. Within this framework, identification is achieved not only with usual moment conditions on the demand side, but also through supply-side restrictions. The model can be estimated by GMM using a nested fixed point algorithm that extends the usual contraction mapping algorithm to our setting. We apply our methodology to estimate the demand and supply in the French new automobile market. Our results suggest that discounting arising from price discrimination is important. The average discount is estimated to be 9.6%, with large variation depending on buyers’ characteristics and cars’ specifications. Our results are consistent with other evidence on transaction prices in France.

We identify the causal effects of short-selling bans on stock prices using regression discontinuity (RD). We exploit three threshold-based rules that determine a stock’s short-selling eligibility on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Short-selling bans have a large effect on short-selling volume at all thresholds. Despite this, bans do not affect stock prices. Stock returns, volatility, and crash risk are not different for banned versus unrestricted stocks when appropriate counterfactual stocks are used to measure a ban’s effects. Our findings suggest that short-selling bans are not as costly as previously argued, but are ineffective at reducing volatility or buttressing prices. Received September 13, 2017; editorial decision April 29, 2018 by Editor Jeffrey Pontiff.

[In the late nineteenth century Britain had almost no mandatory shareholder protections, but had very developed financial markets. We argue that private contracting between shareholders and corporations meant that the absence of statutory protections was immaterial. Using approximately 500 articles of association from before 1900, we code the protections offered to shareholders in these private contracts. We find that firms voluntarily offered shareholders many of the protections that were subsequently included in statutory corporate law. We also find that companies offering better protection to shareholders had less concentrated ownership.]

Using European stock data from two different venues and time periods for which we can identify each trade's aggressor, we test the performance of the bulk volume classification (Easley et al. (2016); BVC) algorithm. BVC is data efficient, but may identify trade aggressors less accurately than “bulk” versions of traditional trade-level algorithms. BVC-estimated trade flow is the only algorithm related to proxies of informed trading, however. This is because traditional algorithms are designed to find individual trade aggressors, but we find that trade aggressor no longer captures information. Finally, we find that after calibrating BVC to trading characteristics in out-of-sample data, it is better able to detect information and to identify trade aggressors. In the new era of fast trading, sophisticated investors, and smart order execution, BVC appears to be the most versatile algorithm.

The office has been a central site of organizational planning, accountability, and control since the 19th century. Yet it has been the subject of relatively little accounting research. Through the dual theoretical lenses of Foucaultian and Labour Process theories, this study employs historical photo‐elicitation methodology to investigate the implementation of management control and accountability in the scientifically managed office which emerged in the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Our analysis reveals the manner in which accounting records created new modes of disciplinary control and surveillance within the office and how accounting tasks were de‐skilled in a gradually feminized and mechanized office environment. We also witness the role of accounting in the physical structuring of office space through the assembly line arrangement of office furniture to facilitate paper flows and the installation of record‐keeping systems of surveillance. In addition, our visually derived historical account of these transformations in office administration allows us to reflect on some contemporary issues. The production‐line design and efficiency so promoted by scientific management served as a forerunner to today's open‐plan office, as well as influencing contemporary office management philosophies such as Activity‐Based Working. Furthermore, we seek to inform current debates on the role of accounting in contemporary neo‐liberal society. In the history of the scientific office, we gain an early glimpse of the subsequent role that accounting comes to play within a neo‐liberal agenda as a powerful technology of micro‐measurement and micro‐management.

Stock return volatility during the Great Depression has been labeled a “volatility puzzle” because the standard deviation of stock returns was 2 to 3 times higher than any other period in American history. We investigate this puzzle using a new series of building permits and leverage. Our results suggest that volatility in building permit growth and financial leverage largely explain the high level of stock volatility during the Great Depression. Markets factored in the possibility of a forthcoming economic disaster. Received September 30, 2017; editorial decision August 27, 2018 by Editor Philip E. Strahan.