Can digital repayment reminders reduce costly credit card delinquency? This paper analyzes data from a 2016 randomized controlled field trial of a reminder sent to 30-days-overdue credit card debtors via an app or online portal. The reminder significantly raised repayment rates, and amounts repaid, of high credit score delinquent debtors, but did not significantly raise the repayment rate of lower credit score delinquents. The reduction in average delinquency among treated debtors continues for at least 12 months after treatment and substantially reduces provisioning expenses of the credit provider. We find that 2.4 percentage points (CI 1.68–3.12) more treated than untreated debtors (64.3% compared with 61.9%) repay all arrears within the current repayment cycle. For the 84.4% of the sample who we observed logged in and saw the reminder, the effect rises to 2.7 percentage points (CI 1.95–3.50).

This paper examines how environmental and social (ES) performance, proxied by related incidents, affect the managerial and analyst tones in quarterly earnings conference calls and its incremental effect on post-earnings call returns. We document that firms experiencing poor ES performance in the quarter prior to the earnings call exhibit more negative management tone after controlling for quarterly financial performance metrics. Tone difference in conference calls between managers and analysts predicts negative abnormal returns in the three-day window around the call. In the 60-day post-call period, we show that firms with poor ES performance exhibit returns negatively related to the tone difference on the conference call – low tone difference leads to return continuation and high tone difference predicts reversals for firms with positive earnings surprises. These results are consistent with an increase in information asymmetry and lower transparency for firms following poor ES performance.

This study uncovers how household investors intensify the effect of the 52-week high (52WH): increased volume and momentum-like returns at the 52WH price. Using daily household and institutional trading data, we find that households sharply increase their selling, particularly with limit orders at the 52WH price. This behavior is indicative of anchoring, as it is robust to past returns and intensified by proximity, market uncertainty, and salience of the 52WH. This uninformed limit order selling at and prior to the 52WH leads to a doubling of unconditional 52WH anomaly returns. Post-event returns benefit institutions, which act as counterparties.

How are trading activity and performance impacted by material events during individual investors’ lifetimes? Using a unique dataset, we identify transfers of common stock initiated by the major event of divorce and analyze trading patterns and performance of divorced traders. In aggregate, divorcing individuals underperform, and part of this underperformance is due to liquidation needs arising from divorce. Cross-sectionally, however, actively-trading divorced investors demonstrate superior performance in the window surrounding divorce settlement, while underperforming just prior to divorce. This result survives a difference-in-differences analysis based on a propensity-score matched sample of non-divorced investors. Our analysis thus suggests that the life-cycle distraction of divorce temporarily reduces the performance of active retail traders, which improves once the stressor is removed.

This study examines whether trading patterns at the 52-week high reflect investor disagreement or behavioral convergence. Using StockTwits sentiment, TAQ microstructure data, and machine-learning-informed trading measures for S&P 500 stocks, we document that investor beliefs converge rather than diverge, thereby reducing disagreement by approximately 20%. Belief dispersion falls while both retail and institutional investors proportionally reduce trading and shift toward selling. Anchoring to the 52-week high generates a liquidity mirage, concentrated among the largest stocks where competitive market making prevails: effective spreads narrow and depth increases even as informed-trading intensity declines, consistent with adverse selection models but driven by behavioral convergence. Although liquidity appears to improve, price discovery weakens, and the stock subsequently underperforms characteristic and factor benchmarks by 20 to 30 basis points over five days. Our findings demonstrate how improvements in liquidity can coincide with weaker price discovery when investor beliefs converge around salient behavioral anchors.