About

Kevin Crotty is an Associate Professor of Finance at Rice University. His research studies the relationship between information and valuations in financial markets and how to evaluate the performance of intermediaries such as equity analysts, mutual funds, and hedge funds. His scholarly work has been published in prominent journals including The Journal of Finance, The Review of Financial Studies, The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Economics Letters, and The Review of Asset Pricing Studies. In addition to numerous presentations at universities and conferences, Kevin has been invited to present his research at leading asset management firms such as PanAgora Asset Management, Man Numeric, and Fidelity, as well as at the Federal Reserve Board, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Treasury’s Office of Financial Research. He has received the Award for Excellence in Research at Rice Business.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Economics
• Econometrics
• Engineering
• Business
• Financial economics
• Internet privacy
• Actuarial science
• Advertising
• Finance

Selected publications

• Should the Public be Concerned about Congressional Stock Trading?

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• How Prevalent is Informed Trade by Corporate Insiders?

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Hedge Funds and Public Information Acquisition

  Management Science · 2022 · 62 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Business
  • Finance

  Hedge funds actively acquire publicly available financial disclosures. Funds acquiring such information subsequently earn 1.5% higher annualized abnormal returns than nonacquirers. Trades by the same fund in the same quarter are more profitable when accompanied by public information acquisition. Acquiring public filings is relatively less profitable when macrouncertainty is high. Funds employ a wide range of strategies for acquiring public filings. Those that systematically scrape large volumes of information, specialize in certain filing types, acquire filings with more content changes, or access information immediately outperform other funds. This paper was accepted by Lukas Schmid, finance. Supplemental Material: The data files and online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4466 .

  PublisherDOI

• Validity, tightness, and forecasting power of risk premium bounds

  Journal of Financial Economics · 2022 · 42 citations

  • Econometrics
  • Economics
  • Financial economics
  PublisherDOI

• The Quality of Advice in Shareholder Voting

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2021-01-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• How Skilled Are Security Analysts?

  The Journal of Finance · 2020 · 56 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Business
  • Econometrics

  ABSTRACT The majority of security analysts are identified as skilled when the cross‐section of analyst performance is modeled as a mixture of multiple skill distributions. Analysts exhibit heterogeneous skill—some are high‐type, and some are low‐type. On average, the recommendation revisions of both types exhibit positive abnormal returns. The heterogeneity stems from differential ability to produce new information; all analysts can profitably process news. Top analysts outperform because more of their recommendations are influential (i.e., associated with statistically significant returns) and both their influential and noninfluential recommendations are more informative. A majority of research firms are also identified as skilled.

  PublisherDOI

• Risk Premium Bounds: Slackness Tests and Return Predictions

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2020-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Public and Private Information: Complements or Substitutes?

  2020-08-07 · 4 citations

  article

  Public information is widely viewed as a way to level the playing field among investors. We provide evidence that is inconsistent with this notion; public information can make private signals more valuable. Hedge funds acquiring public information subsequently earn 1.5%-higher annualized abnormal returns than non-acquirors. Acquisition forecasts news and its value-relevance, suggesting that public information complements private signals. The positive relation between public information acquisition and fund performance is not explained by information processing skill, time-varying effort, or other differences in fund ability. Our results inform theories that make assumptions on the relation between public and private signals.

• Plato and the Body: Reconsidering Socratic Asceticism by Coleen P Zoller

  ˜The œreview of metaphysics · 2019-03-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Reviewed by: Plato and the Body: Reconsidering Socratic Asceticism by Coleen P Zoller Kevin Crotty ZOLLER, Coleen P. Plato and the Body: Reconsidering Socratic Asceticism. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2018. ix + 257 pp. Cloth, $90.00 In this clearly written and well-researched book, Zoller challenges “austere dualism,” which she regards as a major misinterpretation of Plato’s philosophy. For austere dualists, Plato regards the human as a duality of soul and body, and requires that the body’s appetites be suppressed in the interests of cultivating the soul. As opposed to this, Zoller proposes “normative dualism,” in which the soul is still prioritized over the body but the body nonetheless plays an important, though subordinate, role in the philosopher’s life. Moderation, not repression, is what philosophy requires of its adepts. Given Plato’s pervasive influence on subsequent philosophy and on Christianity, Zoller argues, the effects of austere dualism have been profound and pervasive—above all, in the denigration of women. Zoller also sees troubling ecological and racial implications in the austere dualist approach to Plato. After an introductory chapter (“Interpreting Asceticism in Plato”), Zoller goes on to show that the normative dualism she advocates does a better job of explicating the dialogues than does ascetic dualism. In chapter 2, she focuses on the Phaedo—the dialogue that might above all [End Page 619] seem to encourage an ascetic dualist reading. She argues, however, that as Socrates prepares to die he advocates not repressing the appetites but moderating them. When Socrates says that the soul of philosopher atimazei the body, this means that the philosopher does not “disdain” the body (as Grube translates) but merely “esteems it lightly”: that is, the body and the evidence of the senses count less with the true philosopher than what the soul understands. Zoller argues that the senses do in fact play a role in cognition, and that Socrates teaches this in the Phaedo. In favor of her normative dualist approach, she points out, for example, that Socrates himself, even as presented in the Phaedo, is hardly an example of an “ascetic” philosopher. “Ultimately,” she writes, “Socrates’s concern is not literally for the separation of the soul from the body, but for philosophical reasoning to be distinguished from total dependence on the senses.” Keeping away from bodily passions is, properly understood, only “to eschew the perspective that is unduly concerned with physical pleasures”—not to refrain from all sensual gratification. In chapter 3, Zoller turns to two of the erotic dialogues—the Symposium and Phaedrus. These dialogues plainly tell against the austere interpretation of Plato, but Plato might seem to suggest that a committed philosopher will avoid orgasm. Socrates, for example, does not have sex with Alcibiades. Zoller argues, however, that Alcibiades was not a fit philosophical friend to Socrates, and that this—rather than any prohibition of sexual pleasure as such—is the reason why Socrates and Alcibiades never become lovers. In accordance with her normative dualism, Zoller argues that a good Platonist might well enjoy orgasm with a suitable partner, although it would be important to keep the body’s pleasures securely within the control of reason. In chapter 4, the longest in the book, Zoller turns to two political dialogues—the Republic and the Gorgias—and explores the frequent analogy between physical health and justice. She denies that contemplation is the only relevant philosophical activity and argues that love for the idea of the good should inspire the true philosopher to undertake the rigors of governance, as a way to imitate the vision of the good. Zoller argues, too, that the philosopher/ruler will not neglect the physical well-being of citizens and, in particular, will strive to relieve poverty. Chapter 5 briefly looks at some later dialogues in order to sketch the continuity of themes—above all, the importance of normative duality, throughout Plato’s philosophical career. A brief epilogue recapitulates the argument. There is much to admire in Zoller’s book, and I am in general agreement with her main thesis that Plato by and large does not call for the repression of the appetites but counsels, rather, incorporating them in a larger, “constitutional...

  PublisherDOI

• Do Hedge Funds Profit From Public Information?

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2018-01-01 · 12 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Alan D. Crane

  37 shared

• Kerry Back

  23 shared

• Patrick Blonien

  Jones College

  8 shared

• Tao Li

  City University of Hong Kong

  5 shared

• Seyed Mohammad Kazempour

  5 shared

• Tarik Umar

  Rice University

  5 shared

• Sébastien Michenaud

  DePaul University

  3 shared

• David De Angelis

  University of Houston

  2 shared

Awards & honors

• Award for Excellence in Research at Rice Business