Maarten Pronk

• Erasmus University Rotterdam

This paper analyzes stock option trading records of online retail bank investors to assess individual net buy positions in poor versus well performing stock. We study stock options since this is a unique investment category that allows disentangling the heavily-debated contrarian versus emotional bias explanations for individual trading decisions....

Conference calls held in conjunction with an earnings release have become increasingly common in recent years, yet there is little evidence regarding the reasons that these calls are incrementally informative over the accompanying press release. Using a sample of more than 10,000 conference-call transcripts, we examine the information content of bo...

This paper analyzes trading records of online retail bank investors to examine whether attention-type events dominate return feedback strategies in explaining individual investors’ stock option trading decisions. We show that although individual investors are net buyers of common stock on abnormally high volume days, they follow contrarian investme...

ABSTRACT In this paper, we exploit the open nature of conference calls to explore whether managers withhold information from the investing public. Our evidence suggests that managers regularly leave participants on the conference call in the dark by not answering their questions. We find that the best predictors of such an event are firm size, a CE...

This paper explores the use of options by individual investors. We make use of a dataset of online traders of a large Dutch bank, and combine this dataset with a survey containing both hard and soft information about the online investors. We reach several conclusions: Firstly, investors favour shorting options over going long in options. Secondly,...

We investigate a key assumption underlying much of the experimental research in financial accounting that graduate business students are a good proxy for nonprofessional investors. To conduct our investigation, we categorize recent experimental studies in financial accounting, based on the relative level of integrative complexity inherent in each s...

Using a sample of over 10,000 earnings-related conference call transcripts, we examine the determinants of within-firm variation in the length of managers' presentation and analyst discussion periods during earnings-related conference calls. We find that managers' presentations are longer when reporting poor performance and when earnings are a pote...

In this study we use a unique dataset to examine whether professional and nonprofessional investors use different online quarterly financial information when making investment decisions, and whether the online information they use depends on whether they are researching a new investment or evaluating a current investment. Our results suggest profes...

We investigate a key assumption underlying much of the experimental research in financial accounting that graduate business students are a good proxy for non-professional investors. To conduct our investigation, we categorize recent experimental studies in financial accounting based on the relative level of integrative complexity inherent in each s...

Libby, Mathieu, and Robb (2002) investigate, among other things, the impact of intraday timing of earnings announcements on the bid-ask spread and depth for a sample of firms listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange. They document, in a univariate setting, that the spread is relatively wider and the depth lower after announcements declared during nontr...

Libby, Mathieu and Robb (2002) investigate, among other things, the impact of intraday timing of earnings announcements on the bid-ask spread and depth for a sample of firms listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange. They document, in a univariate setting, that the spread is relatively wider and the depth lower after announcements declared during non-tr...

We investigate a key assumption underlying much of the experimental research in financial accounting that graduate business students are a reasonable proxy for nonprofessional investors. We investigate this assumption using two settings: (a) an experimental setting from a recent paper that relies on this assumption, and (b) by using a proprietary d...

Prior literature indicates that bid-ask spreads are higher and depths are lower around earnings announcements than during non-announcement periods. This thesis investigates two important aspects of this drop in market liquidity, namely (a) the ability of management to mitigate the drop in market liquidity around earnings announcements by using thei...