About

Bruce Carlin is the George R. Brown Professor of Finance at Rice University. Prior to his tenure at Rice, he spent 12 years on the faculty at UCLA. He is a Faculty Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), the Director of the Financial Research Association (FRA), and has served as an Associate Editor of the Review of Financial Studies. His research interests encompass consumer finance, asset pricing, corporate finance, and behavioral finance, utilizing methodologies that include theoretical, empirical, and experimental work. His research topics are diverse and include studying FinTech, social media and fake news, Kentucky thoroughbred horse auctions, farming in the 1920s, and the societal effects of legalizing marijuana. Bruce has served as an expert witness in matters involving consumer and corporate finance, healthcare, life sciences, product liability, and valuation, testifying in venues such as U.S. district courts, state superior courts, and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA). Outside of his professional pursuits, he emphasizes life balance and has hobbies including masters swimming, poker, and blues guitar playing.

Research topics

• Economics
• Computer Science
• Business
• Financial economics
• Computer Security
• Monetary economics
• Process management
• Operations management
• Finance
• World Wide Web
• Microeconomics
• Internet privacy

Selected publications

• Bidder Pools in Mergers and Acquisitions

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Uncovering the Hidden Effort Problem

  The Journal of Finance · 2025-02-17 · 8 citations

  articleOpen access

  ABSTRACT We analyze minute‐by‐minute Bloomberg online status and study how the effort provision of executives in public corporations affects firm value. While executives spend most of their time doing other activities, patterns of Bloomberg usage allow us to characterize their work habits as measures of effort provision. We document a positive effect of effort on unexpected earnings and cumulative abnormal returns following earnings announcements, and a reduction in credit default swap spreads. This is robust to using exogenous weather patterns as an instrument. Long‐short, calendar‐time effort portfolios earn significant average daily returns. Finally, we revisit important agency issues from the literature.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Project Development with Delegated Bargaining: The Role of Elevated Hurdle Rates

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Project Development with Delegated Bargaining: The Role of Elevated Hurdle Rates

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2024-03-01 · 2 citations

  reportOpen access

  During project development, costs are endogenously determined through delegated bargaining with counterparties.In surveys, nearly 80% of CFOs report using an elevated hurdle rate, the implications of which we explore in a delegated bargaining model.We show that elevated hurdle rates can convey a bargaining advantage that exceeds the opportunity cost of forgone projects, whether hurdle rate buffers arise for strategic or non-strategic reasons.Using CFO survey data, we find buffer use is negatively related to the cost of capital and ex ante bargaining power, consistent with the model, and that realized returns exhibit "beat the hurdle rate benchmark" behavior.

  PublisherDOI

• Discretionary Announcement Timing and Stock Returns 

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• American Disclosure Options

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Deputizing financial institutions to fight elder abuse

  Journal of Financial Economics · 2023-07-17 · 7 citations

  articleOpen access1st author

  Permissive laws deputize financial professionals to screen for misbehavior without providing explicit incentives. These are very common in financial markets. To evaluate their effectiveness, we exploit the staggered adoption of the 2016 Model Act provisions intended to curb elder abuse. We find a drop in reports of abuse by financial professionals to the Department of Treasury and, separately, in financial crimes against the elderly as monitored by the FBI . The effect is stronger where the elderly are more isolated. Our results highlight the role financial professionals play in combating social problems and the impact of permissive policies.

  PublisherDOI

• Security Analysis and the Collection of Hard and Soft Information

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• American Disclosure Options

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2023-12-01

  reportOpen access

  We study strategic disclosure timing by correlated firms in the presence of risk-averse investors.Firms delay disclosures in the hope that positively correlated firms will announce especially good news and lift their own price.Risk premia rise before disclosures, drop when disclosures occur, and then rise again.Conditional risk premia can be much larger than unconditional risk premia.Disclosures are always good news, but disclosures that are only moderately good news induce clustering of disclosures by other positively correlated firms.We present evidence of strategic behavior in earnings announcement timing as predicted by the model.

  PublisherDOI

• Security Analysis and the Collection of Hard and Soft Information

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2023-12-01 · 4 citations

  reportOpen access

  We use minute-by-minute Bloomberg online status microdata during 2017-2021 to directly study how hard and soft information collection affects equity analyst performance. Collection of hard information, proxied by office workday length, is positively associated with the quantity and timeliness of analyst reports. Soft information collection, as proxied by propensity to travel, is positively correlated with the market’s reaction to recommendation changes and the likelihood of becoming a star analyst. Both hard and soft information collection improve forecast precision, a causal result that we confirm using the COVID lockdown as an instrument.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Gustavo Manso

  University of California, Berkeley

  54 shared

• Simon Gervais

  30 shared

• Zhi Da

  16 shared

• Shaun Davies

  University of Colorado Boulder

  15 shared

• Shimon Kogan

  Brandman University

  14 shared

• Andrew Miles Iannaccone

  UCLA Health

  13 shared

• David T. Robinson

  Duke University

  13 shared

• Daniel Andrei

  McGill University

  12 shared