I show that firm location decisions create barriers to accessing high-wage employers for students at distant universities. I collect office locations and campus recruiting strategies for more than 70 banking and consulting firms from 2000 to 2013. After firms open an office, students at nearby universities are nearly four times more likely to have on-campus access to the firm. Access increases for universities across a wide range of selectivity. Additional data from universities, LinkedIn, and mobility report cards suggest effects on hires and longer-run income success.

This paper examines how, and to what extent, cross-listing impacts corporate dividend smoothing. We report significantly increased dividend smoothing, with idiosyncratic sectoral responses, after cross-listing. Furthermore, we show that sectoral competition and local market development explain the extent of dividend smoothing after cross-listing. To study the dynamics in dividend smoothing channels after cross-listing, we adopt a variance decomposition approach. We find substantial variation in the use of debt and investment channels to absorb net income shocks, keeping dividends smooth after cross-listing. Our findings suggest that, with increased access to a larger pool of capital in the U.S., cross-listed firms are motivated to keep dividends stable through debt and investment decisions after cross-listing.

We study the effects of social media on the informativeness of retail trading. Our identification strategy exploits the editorial delay between report submission and publication on Seeking Alpha, a popular crowdsourced investment research platform. We find the ability of retail order imbalances to predict the cross-section of stock returns and cash-flow news increases sharply in the intraday post-publication window relative to the pre-publication window. The findings are robust to controlling for report tone and stronger for reports authored by more capable contributors. The evidence suggests that recent technology-enabled innovations in how individuals share information help retail investors become better informed.

We examine how increased competition stemming from an innovation in financial technology influences sell-side analyst research quality. We find that firms added to Estimize, an open platform that crowdsources short-term earnings forecasts, experience a pervasive and substantial reduction in consensus bias and a limited increase in consensus accuracy relative to matched control firms. Long-term forecasts and investment recommendations remain similarly biased, alleviating the concern that the documented reduction in bias is a response to broad economic forces. At the individual analyst level, we find that bias reduction is more pronounced among close-to-management analysts, and that more biased analysts respond by reducing their coverage of Estimize firms. The collective evidence suggests that competition from Estimize improves sell-side research quality by discouraging strategic bias.

Non‐deal roadshows (NDRs) are private meetings between management and institutional investors, typically organized by sell‐side analysts. We find that around NDRs, local institutional investors trade heavily and profitably, while retail trading is significantly less informed. Analysts who sponsor NDRs issue significantly more optimistic recommendations and target prices, together with more “beatable” earnings forecasts, consistent with analysts issuing strategically biased forecasts to win NDR business. Our results suggest that NDRs result in a substantial information advantage for institutional investors and create significant conflicts of interests for the analysts who organize them.