We study how CEOs’ personal tax incentives shape their share pledging decisions and firms’ restrictions on the practice. Pledging shares entails using company stock as collateral for personal loans, enabling executives to obtain liquidity without making a taxable sale of appreciated shares. Using pledging data from 2006 to 2024, we find a robust positive relation between CEOs’ unrealized capital gains tax liabilities, or tax burdens, and share pledging. This relation is weaker when interest rates are high, consistent with CEOs’ trading off tax benefits against borrowing costs. After Institutional Shareholder Services discouraged share pledging in 2012, firms with high-tax-burden CEOs were slower to adopt antipledging policies and, when they did adopt, chose less restrictive policies. Firms that adopted strong antipledging policies subsequently increased CEO cash pay and stock awards. Our evidence suggests that share pledging helps executives manage personal tax lock-in and that firms consider this benefit when restricting pledging. Data Availability: Data are available from the public and subscription sources identified in the text, subject to applicable data-use restrictions.

We study the use of generative AI for firm‐specific financial analysis on the Seeking Alpha platform. After the initial launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, the share of AI‐generated articles rose sharply to 13.5% of all articles, then declined in late 2023 after Seeking Alpha equated the use of AI to plagiarism and announced a prohibition on its use. We organize our study around two questions: (1) Does AI use increase author productivity? and (2) does AI use have capital market consequences and ultimately affect the informational landscape? We find that authors who adopt AI become more productive, publishing more articles and covering more new firms than non‐adopters. Findings on AI article informativeness are more nuanced. On average, AI articles are less informative than human‐written articles, eliciting smaller trading volume and abnormal return responses. However, AI use leads to increased firm coverage and in turn to improved liquidity and faster price discovery. Our findings suggest that, while AI‐generated articles are currently perceived as less informative than human‐written articles, their comparatively low cost enables increased firm coverage and thereby improves the overall informational landscape.