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The purpose of this paper is to examine institutional investor demand for shares of firms that announce patents.

There are three important dates in the process of obtaining a patent. First, a patent filer requests the right for intellectual property on the application date. Next, the content of a patent becomes publicly available on the publication date, if authorized by the US Patent and Trademark Office. Third, once the patent is validated, it is issued on the grant date. The authors focus on the publication date, as it marks the time when the patent-specific information is disclosed to public. In a regression framework, the authors analyze how institutional investors respond to patent publications.

The authors document a significant increase in institutional demand for a firm’s shares around patent announcements. Institutional investors react more strongly to patent publications announced by firms that have published frequently in the past. The increase in demand is also greater when the firm’s shareholder base consists of a higher percentage of long-term institutions. Institutional trading around patent announcements is associated with higher levels of stock price informativeness. In addition, firms that announce patents exhibit long-term outperformance relative to a control sample. Overall, the results suggest that institutional trading conveys information about the value of patents.

This study is the first to explore changes in institutional demand around patent publications and to show that such events attract institutional investors and have an impact on shareholder wealth, price informativeness and liquidity.

Knowledge of spreadsheet tools like Microsoft Excel is a valuable skill to have in today’s job market. The preliminary assessment of a group of business school students shows that most of them struggle to perform simple tasks in a spreadsheet. The purpose of this paper is to propose using student tutors to teach these skills.

The authors identify students proficient in Excel as tutors and organize one-on-one peer tutoring lessons. The authors compare the Excel competency level of students prior to and after the tutoring sessions.

The results suggest that most students with minimal Excel skills significantly improve their competency level after tutoring.

The proposed hands-on approach appears to be effective in helping students acquire basic Excel capabilities.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a new measure of portfolio activity, the modified turnover (MT), which represents the portion of the portfolio that the manager changes from one quarter to the next. Compared with the traditional turnover, the MT measure has a distinct interpretation, relies on portfolio holdings, includes the effects of flows and ignores the effects of offsetting trades.

Using quarterly holdings data, the authors examine the relationship between fund turnover, performance, and flows for a sample of 2,856 actively managed mutual funds over the period 1991-2012. The authors provide numerical examples to illustrate how the suggested measure, MT, is different from the traditional turnover measure. The authors use panel regressions, simple and double sorts to examine the predictability of performance.

The authors find evidence that high MT predicts lower performance. The comparison between the highest and lowest quintiles sorted based on MT reveals a difference of −2.41 percent in the annual risk-adjusted return. Furthermore, high MT predicts lower net flows. The authors also find that MT relates positively to other activeness measures while volatility, flows, size, number of stocks, and the expense ratio are significant determinants of MT. Overall, the results suggest that frequent churning of a portfolio is value destroying for investors and signals a manager’s lack of skill.

The authors offer a simple measure, namely, MT, for estimating the fraction of a portfolio that changes from one quarter to the next. Armed with this tool, the authors investigate whether funds deviate from their previous quarter’s holdings because of valuable or noisy information, and whether such signals are exploited by fund investors.