These papers are working drafts of research which often appear in final form in academic journals. The published versions may differ from the working versions provided here.
SSRN Research Paper Series
The Social Science Research Network’s Research Paper Series includes working papers produced by Stanford GSB the Rock Center.
You may search for authors and topics and download copies of the work there.
We develop a measure of how information events impact investors’ perceptions of firms’ riskiness. We derive this measure from an option-pricing model where investors anticipate an announcement containing information on the mean…
We introduce a parsimonious framework for choosing among alternative expected-return proxies (ERPs) when estimating treatment effects. By comparing ERPs’ measurement-error variances in the cross-section and time series, we provide…
Pay for non-performance is among the most prominent arguments of executive rent extraction, especially Bertrand and Mullainathan’s (2001) pay for luck. We revisit their finding over the last two decades, 1997 through 2016. Pay for…
We examine the association between thousands of state and local firm-specific tax subsidies and business activity in the surrounding county, measured as the number of employees, aggregate wages, per capita employment, per capita…
We examine whether financial reporting quality influences employee turnover and wages using employer-employee matched data in the U.S. We find that low financial reporting quality is associated with high employee turnover risk, so…
We investigate the effect of patent disclosures on corporate innovation. Using the American Inventor’s Protection Act (AIPA) as a shock that increased patent disclosures, we find an increase in innovation for firms whose rivals…
We establish a link between firms managing investors’ performance expectations, earnings announcement premia, and cyclical patterns (i.e., seasonalities) in returns. Firms that are more likely to manage expectations toward…
We study firms that go public through reverse mergers (RMs) versus initial public offerings (IPOs) in China. Using a manually assembled data set, we show that pre-listing RM firms are larger, more profitable, and less politically…
We provide the first partner tenure and mandatory rotation analysis for a large cross-section of U.S. publicly listed firms over an extended period. We analyze the effects on audit quality as well as on audit pricing and…
We use trade-level data to examine the role of actively managed funds (AMFs) in earnings news dissemination. AMFs trade 170 percent more on earnings announcement (EA) days than on non-EA days. Abnormal AMF participation is…
We develop a Loan Portfolio Risk (LPR) variable that measures time-varying volatility in default risk for a portfolio of bank loans. An Equity-to-LPR ratio ( ELPR ) is incrementally important in predicting bank failure up to five…
We investigate whether managers internalize the spillover effects of their disclosure on the stock price of related firms and strategically alter their disclosure decisions when doing so is beneficial. Using data on firm-initiated…
Predicted stock issuers (PSIs) are firms with expected “high-investment and low-profit” (HILP) profiles that earn unusually low returns. We carefully document important features of PSI firms to provide insights on the economic…
Does decomposing cost of goods sold entail significant competitive costs? We examine this question using a relaxation of disaggregated manufacturing cost disclosure requirements in Korea. Our survey evidence indicates managers…
We study whether innovation box tax incentives, which reduce tax rates on innovation-related income, are associated with tax-motivated income shifting, investment, and employment in the countries that implement these regimes…
This study examines how an increase in tick size affects algorithmic trading (AT), fundamental information acquisition (FIA), and the price discovery process around earnings announcements (EAs). Leveraging the SEC’s randomized…
This study investigates whether investors are willing to trade-off wealth for societal benefits. We take advantage of unique institutional features of the municipal securities market to provide insight into this question. Since…
We examine the selection of peer groups that boards of directors use when setting the level of CEO compensation. This choice is controversial because it is difficult to ascertain whether peer groups are selected to (i) attract and…
We construct a novel measure of disclosure choice by firms. Our measure uses linguistic analysis of conference calls to flag a manager’s response as providing an explicit “non-answer” to an analyst’s question. Using our measure…
Abstract coming soon.