Purpose 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. Design/methodology/approach 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. Findings The results suggest that most students with minimal Excel skills significantly improve their competency level after tutoring. Originality/value The proposed hands-on approach appears to be effective in helping students acquire basic Excel capabilities.

At least one co-author has disclosed a financial relationship of potential relevance for this research. Further information is available online at http://www.nber.org/papers/w25814.ack NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine institutional investor demand for shares of firms that announce patents. Design/methodology/approach 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. Findings 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. Originality/value 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.

We find that the relationship between activeness and future fund performance significantly weakens after the passage of regulation fair disclosure (FD). The ability of Active Share to predict four‐factor alpha is more than five times smaller after FD. More active funds embed a higher degree of private information into prices of traded stocks, and the extent to which these funds affect price informativeness diminishes in the post‐FD era. Stocks traded by more active funds exhibit a higher degree of information asymmetry, and this relationship also weakens after FD. Our findings suggest that one of the channels through which more active funds generated a higher alpha before FD was through the selective disclosure of information.