We develop an information choice model where information costs are sticky and co-move with firm-level intrinsic uncertainty as opposed to temporal variations in uncertainty. Incorporating analysts' forecasts, we predict a negative relationship between information costs and information acquisition, as proxied by the predictability of analysts' forecast biases. Finally, the model shows a contrasting pattern between information acquisition and intrinsic and temporal uncertainty, where intrinsic uncertainty strengthens return predictability of analysts' biases through the information cost channel, while temporal uncertainty weakens it through the information benefit channel. We empirically confirm these opposing relationships that existing theories struggle to explain.

Site visits allow visitors to physically inspect productive resources and interact with onsite employees and executives face-to-face. We posit that, by allowing visitors to acquire investmentrelated information and monitor the management team, site visits offer disciplinary benefits for corporate investments. Using mandatory disclosures of site visits in China, we find that corporate investments become more responsive to growth opportunities as the intensity of site visits increases, consistent with the notion that site visits yield disciplinary benefits. We also find that the positive association between site visits and investment efficiency is more pronounced when visitors can glean more investment-related information and when they have stronger incentives and greater power to monitor managers. This positive association is also stronger among firms with more severe agency problems and higher asset tangibility. The overall evidence supports the notion that site visits serve as a unique venue for institutional investors and financial analysts to acquire valuable information and serve a monitoring function, which generates disciplinary benefits for corporate investments.

This study examines how short-sale constraints affect investors’ information acquisition and thereby shape stock price efficiency. By exploiting two settings that relax short-sale constraints in the US and China, respectively, we find that the removal of short-sale constraints increases investors’ information acquisition in both markets, but the effect is more prompt in China. Investors acquire value-relevant information, especially bad news, and improve their short-selling decisions in both markets. Lastly, information acquisition induced by the removal of short-sale constraints improves price efficiency. Our evidence shows that a reduction in trading frictions promotes information acquisition and improves price efficiency.

This study examines how short-sale constraints affect investors’ information acquisition and thereby shape stock price efficiency. By exploiting two settings that relax short-sale constraints in the US and China, respectively, we find that the removal of short-sale constraints increases investors’ information acquisition in both markets, but the effect is more prompt in China. Investors acquire value-relevant information, especially bad news, and improve their short-selling decisions in both markets. Lastly, information acquisition induced by the removal of short-sale constraints improves price efficiency. Our evidence shows that a reduction in trading frictions promotes information acquisition and improves price efficiency.

This study investigates whether and how the central discipline inspection of the securities regulators affects the information environment and investor valuation in the Chinese capital market. Based on the private equity placement (PEP) events, we find that the self-interested media outlets provide more negative coverage of the passed PEP firms during the inspection period than those passed outside the inspection period, resulting in poorer stock returns. Additionally, we find that the negative effect of the inspection on the PEPs’ market reactions is attenuated in media-connected firms and firms with higher advertising expenditure. However, we do not find significant long-term market performance differences between the passed PEP firms during the inspection period and those passed outside the inspection period. Additional results show that during the inspection period, the securities regulators tend to approve the PEP applicants with better initial announcement returns. Moreover, sophisticated investors pay a higher price for the shares of these passed PEP firms during the inspection period. Collectively, our findings suggest that anti-corruption campaigns have unintended effects that hinder retail investors’ access to objective information.

By using a proprietary real–time daily online sales data collected in China from 10–billion consumer accounts, this paper ffnds that the ffrm–level daily online sales growth (DOSG) can positively predict future one–day to more than three–month cumulative stock returns in the cross section, implying a growth premium in contrast to Lakonishok, Shleifer, and Vishny (1994). A spread portfolio that is long on stocks with high DOSG and short on stocks with low DOSG delivers an abnormal return of around 30 basis points per week. DOSG derives its short–run (e.g., weekly) predictability from investor sentiments, tilting to a behavioral explanation. However, it derives its medium to long–run (e.g., three–month) predictability from fundamentals, voting for a rational explanation. Our further evidence indicates that stocks with high DOSG experience more intensive information acquisition from retail investors and less severe crash risk, implying online sales as a channel for retail investors to get access to daily real–time ffrm fundamentals.

Using the staggered opening of governmental public data platforms in China, we employ the difference-in-difference approach to investigate how public data access affects stock price synchronicity. We find that stock price synchronicity significantly drops after the public data platform is established in a firm’s headquarters city. The underlying mechanism is reducing information acquisition costs rather than increasing market attention or corporate information disclosure quality. Furthermore, the informational role of public data platforms magnifies under higher informed trade risk, poorer corporate governance, or better regional economic and innovation capacity. We highlight the role of public data in facilitating financial market efficiency.

This study investigates the impact of independent directors' participation in the shareholders meeting on corporate governance, and finds that the more frequently the independent directors attend shareholder meetings, the lower the degree of earnings management by the enterprise; the mechanism test shows that more information increases the probability, frequency, and severity of independent directors’ subsequent dissenting opinions; This study identified a new channel for independent directors to independently obtain true information and this is of great significance for regulators, shareholders, company board, and other stakeholders with an interest in how the information influence independent directors governance effects.

We examine the influence of implicit government guarantees on the information content of credit ratings in China, guided by a theoretical credit rating game model in the presence of government guarantees. Using issuers’ controlling shareholder identity as the defining metric of implicit government guarantees, we document a less sensitive relationship between credit ratings and primary market offer yields for SOE bonds (i.e., bonds issued by firms controlled by government or government related agencies) than that for non SOE bonds. Moreover, ratings of non SOE bonds have a stronger predictive power on both future downgrades and a market based measure of issuer expected default probability than those of SOE bonds. These findings are robust to considering the u nobserved influence of the controlling shareholder identity on security pricing and bond default risk. Taken together, our empirical findings are consistent with the model’s prediction that government guarantees can dampen the incentives for credit rating agencies to acquire costly information, thus lowering the equilibrium informativeness of ratings for SOE bonds.