A growing literature uses the Russell 1000/2000 reconstitution event as an identification strategy to investigate corporate finance and asset pricing questions. To implement this identification strategy, researchers need to approximate the ranking variable used to assign stocks to indexes. We...

We study empirically whether short selling deters the incorporation of positive information. We find a sizeable reduction of positive information impounding before earnings announcements for stocks more exposed to short selling. The price pressure from short selling cannot explain this effect....

Mandatory contributions to defined benefit pension plans provide a unique identification strategy to estimate the market's assessment of the value of internal resources controlling for investment opportunities. The drop in prices following these cash outflows is magnified for firms that appear a...

In the first three decades of CRSP data, value stocks have higher betas than growth stocks. Later on, the ranking is reversed and the gap in beta widens. What makes growth strategies nowadays bear more market risk than value strategies? What are the causes of the reversal in the ranking of...

We complement the conditional CAPM by introducing unobservable long-run changes in risk factor loadings. In this environment, investors rationally 'learn' the long-level of factor loadings from the observation of realized returns. As a direct consequence of this assumption, conditional betas are...