• 2025
• Working Paper

We document foreign biases in AI-generated financial predictions: ChatGPT (U.S.-based) is systematically more optimistic about Chinese firms than DeepSeek (China-based), predicting higher end-of-year stock prices and generating more buy recommendations. This AI-specific phenomenon contradicts the traditional home bias in which investors favor domestic assets. We trace this bias to differential information access: ChatGPT's optimism increases when US media coverage of Chinese firms' negative news is scarce relative to Chinese media. Supporting this mechanism, placebo tests with synthetic Chinese firms without such asymmetries show no prediction gap between models. Crucially, providing ChatGPT with Chinese news through prompts—which cannot alter model weights—completely eliminates the prediction gap, demonstrating that the bias stems from missing training data. Our findings imply that the parallel development of LLMs in different countries can create divergent financial forecasts, potentially amplifying rather than reducing cross-border information asymmetries as these tools shape investment decisions globally.

• September 2025
• Article

We investigate the impact of observing peers’ information acquisition on financial analysts’ allocation of attention. Using the timely disclosure mandate by the Shenzhen Stock Exchange as a setting, we find that, shortly after analysts observe that a firm has been visited by peer analysts, they reduce short-term attention to that firm, as indicated by a reduced tendency to conduct follow-up visits. Nonvisiting analysts who do not conduct follow-up visits are more likely to discontinue coverage of the visited firm. These findings are consistent with the conjecture that the timely disclosure reveals the first-mover advantage of visiting analysts, leading nonvisiting ones to reallocate their limited attention. We also find that, compared to the pre-mandate period, the information environments of visited firms deteriorate immediately after an analyst’s visit but not over the longer term. Further evidence suggests that the timely disclosure mandate has positive externalities in the form of increased immediate attention to and improved short-term information environments of unvisited peer firms.

• September 2025
• Article

In this paper, we examine how the development of voluntary sustainability standards has affected the nature of information covered in conference calls. Using industry-specific dictionaries of sustainability terms contained in the disclosure standards developed by the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), we find a significant increase in coverage of sustainability topics identified as relevant to investors in SASB standards, particularly for entities that had little or no coverage of sustainability issues historically. This trend begins around the time when SASB released a provisional disclosure standard for a given company’s industry and continues in the years after. We also find a stronger impact of SASB standards on conference call content for firms operating in industries with greater ex-ante uncertainty about which sustainability topics are more likely to be financially material. Overall, our paper provides timely evidence as jurisdictions around the world consider whether to support sustainability reporting in their capital markets and, if so, how.