Job Market Paper
Mixed Messages: Strategic Tonal Inconsistency and Recovery of the PEAD Anomaly
Using conference call transcripts and contemporaneous press releases, I document that inconsistent managerial tone across these communication channels recovers a narrative-driven form of the Post-Earnings-Announcement Drift (PEAD) anomaly that remains potent where the Standardized Unexpected Earnings (SUE)-based drift has been arbitraged away. Specifically, a downward drift arises following tonally inconsistent disclosures. This delayed price decline for inconsistent announcements facilitates strategic and opportunistic insider trading and is robustly associated with subsequent adverse changes in firm fundamentals. I validate that the documented tonal inconsistency is a non-random phenomenon, rather than linguistic noise, using a Large Language Model (LLM)-based placebo test. I further find that tonally inconsistent messaging reflects a strategy that is employed in response to poor firm performance and partially engineered through topical divergence between the two disclosures. Overall, the evidence aligns with managers strategically employing mixed messaging in financial disclosures to mislead investors about underlying firm fundamentals by manipulating market perceptions and exploiting informational frictions, which appear to be induced by ambiguity.
Presentations:
Southwestern Finance Association (SWFA) Annual Meeting, 2026
Midwest Finance Association (MFA) Annual Meeting, 2026
American Finance Association (AFA) PhD Poster Session, 2026
33rd Finance Forum, 2026
Financial Management & Accounting Research Conference (FMARC) Doctoral Colloquium, 2026
Financial Management Association (FMA) Annual Meeting, Session: Consequences of Strategic Communications, 2025
Rady School of Management, UC San Diego, 2025
DeGroote School of Business, McMaster University, 2025
Schulich School of Business, York University, 2025
Faculty of Business and Information Technology, Ontario Tech University, 2025
Travel Grants:
American Finance Association (AFA)
Southwestern Finance Association (SWFA)
Academic Excellence Fund, York University
Schulich PhD Conference Fund
YUGSA Conference Support Fund
Working Paper
I construct a world embedding: a daily, low-dimensional vector that compresses news narratives, financial market data, policy uncertainty, geopolitical risk, and macroeconomic releases into a unified representation of the aggregate economic state. A machine-learning-based multimodal encoder produces this embedding under a strict expanding-window protocol, ensuring the series is look-ahead-free at every point in time. Unsupervised clustering of the world embedding recovers known business-cycle regimes with higher fidelity than linear methods, and the representation carries incremental out-of-sample forecasting power for labor-market indicators. The primary contribution addresses the interest-rate spanning puzzle: embedding principal components capture unspanned macro risks that raise the in-sample R2 for bond excess returns by 10 to 34 percentage points beyond standard yield-curve factors. This predictive content originates from non-yield information and survives out-of-sample evaluation, orthogonalization, and a pseudo-out-of-sample extension through the Covid-19 pandemic.
Echoing Messages: Narrative Trend-Following and Transient Capital
When managers tilt their earnings-call narratives toward the themes analysts have recently been probing, short-horizon mutual funds increase their positions while moderate-and longhorizon funds do not. The effect is amplified among firms where independent verification of narrative content is costly and intensifies after the mid-2010s diffusion of open-source Natural language processing (NLP) tools, concentrating in the machine-readable components of alignment. Value-weighted portfolios formed on alignment earn negative Fama-French fivefactor alpha over the four months following formation, and high-alignment firms subsequently miss earnings forecasts and experience margin erosion despite continued revenue growth. The horizon gradient in trading, the concentration in opaque firms, and the divergence between revenue growth and profitability jointly weigh against a signaling interpretation and support a catering channel in which narrative conformity attracts transient capital that is repriced once hard information arrives.
Presentations:
Financial Management Association (FMA) Annual Meeting, Session: New Ideas in FinTech, 2025
The Green Side of the China Shock: Environmental Responses of U.S. Firms to Import Competition
with Phuong-Anh Nguyen, Ambrus Kecskés, Ali Ahmadi, and Rui Duan.
Confronted by Chinese import competition, U.S. manufacturing firms with strong prior environmental records strategically reduce pollution, leveraging their green capabilities to build financial resilience and gain a competitive advantage.
Pre-Doctoral Publication
Individual Investors’ Intensive Trading and Stock Returns: Evidence from Tehran Stock Exchange TSE
with Ali Ebrahimnejad, and Masoud Talebian
Journal of Asset Management and Financing, April 2021
DOI: 10.22108/amf.2021.126141.1610
This research examines the trading patterns of individual investors in an emerging market. The study contributes to the literature by documenting a distinct pattern of retail investor activity compared to what is typically observed in developed capital markets.