Finance - Costello

It’s good PR for banks to tout their tight relationships with borrowers in their local community. But do they put their money where their mouth is? George Mason University finance professor Stephen Karolyi sheds light on how lenders weigh the value of future relationships against concrete payoffs in the here and now.

Retail investor attention creates an incentive for firms to present earnings that satisfy investors' expectations using accounting discretion. Such a “numbers game” – the use of legally permissible accounting practices to influence reported earnings – makes investor attention an economic force influencing corporate reporting decisions, argues finance professor Lei Gao of George Mason University.

The widely used machine-learning technique known as LASSO relegates smaller market events to an ignored “inactive zone”. How can that be a good thing for ambitious asset traders? Bo Hu, assistant professor of finance, explores the logic (and illogic) behind LASSO’s popularity and power.

Air quality standards do more than reduce pollution for noncompliant counties; they increase the cost of funding public infrastructure like schools, hospitals, and roads.

It’s no surprise that short-selling carries heavy weight on Wall Street. But next to nothing has been known about the agent lenders from whom short-sellers borrow their shares—until now.

We know from prior research that savvy investors respond to ESG data. But a pair of finance professors have discovered perhaps the most lucrative wrinkle in this strategy.

Under the supervision of Costello professor Derek Horstmeyer, student-driven research insights are raising eyebrows among employers—and readers of major newspapers.

Fake trades engineered to juice an exchange’s numbers have been a part of bitcoin exchanges since the beginning, finds a George Mason finance prof.

In churchgoing counties, financial advisors are more likely to remember their ethical training and resist the temptation to misbehave.

You can tell a lot about a hedge fund’s quality—and long-term performance—from the market climate in which it was launched.
Lin Sun, assistant professor of finance, recently published a paper in Review of Finance that compares hedge funds formed in high-demand, or “hot,” markets to those produced in a “cold” market climate.