Author Archives: elvirascarlat

In our recent work, published in Harvard Business Review and based on our Journal of Banking & Finance paper, we study conflicts of interest in the banking industry. We show that brokerages with a higher share of women see their analysts (men and women alike) issue less inflated target prices when pressure is highest, i.e.,Continue reading “Gender Composition Reduces Analysts’ Optimism Bias Under Pressure”

Studying corporate bonds around firms’ first ASC 842 earnings announcements, our paper shows that when newly recognized lease liabilities came in higher than investors had inferred from footnotes, bond yields stepped up within days. The reaction was asymmetrical: markets punished underestimated lease debt but didn’t reward overestimates. The histogram in the figure below shows thatContinue reading “ASC 842 didn’t just move leases onto the balance sheet; it moved bond spreads”

Inside large U.S. firms, similarity quietly moves information. Analyzing insider trades from 1995–2016, we find that sharing a salient identity (especially gender) between insiders and the CEO/CFO opens informal channels that show up in trading results. When a woman holds the top executive or finance seat, female insiders’ trades become more profitable while men’s edgeContinue reading “Social commonalities make people click… and share private information”