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:
American Finance Association (AFA) PhD Poster Session, 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)
Schulich PhD Conference Fund
YUGSA Conference Support Fund
Working Paper
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.
Work in Progress
Echoes in the Messages: Managerial Narrative Alignment with Market Discourse and Capital Market Consequences
This paper develops a novel AI-driven measure to investigate the capital market consequences of corporate narrative choices, finding that markets reward firms with distinctive narratives and penalize those that conform to market-wide topics. The study further proposes using Inverse Reinforcement Learning to empirically uncover the latent managerial incentives, such as boosting short-term valuation or personal reputation, that drive these strategic disclosure decisions.
Presentations:
Financial Management Association (FMA) Annual Meeting, Session: New Ideas in Fintech, 2025
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.