Description: Paul Ma is an assistant professor at the Carlson School of Management in the University of Minnesota.
information (7898) accounting (6027) minnesota (3588) economics (1263) finances (944) stanford (265) disclosure (136) asset pricing (10) paul ma (1) behavior finance (1)
paulma [at] umn.edu
We estimate a dynamic model of voluntary disclosure, using annual management forecasts of earnings, that features a manager with price motives and an uncertain but persistent information endowment. Our estimates imply that: (i) managers face disclosure frictions 35% of the time; (ii) conditional on being informed, managers withhold information 17% of the time; and (iii) conditional on being silent, managers possess information 24% of the time. Managers’ strategic withholding motives increase investors’ unce
Applying a "co-search" algorithm to Internet traffic at the SEC's EDGAR website, we develop a novel method for identifying economically-related peer firms. Our results show that firms appearing in chronologically adjacent searches by the same individual (Search Based Peers or SBPs) are fundamentally similar on multiple dimensions. In direct tests, SBPs dominate GICS6 industry peers in explaining cross-sectional variations in base firms' out-of-sample: (a) stock returns, (b) valuation multiples, (c) growth r