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.
Executive Pay Transparency and Relative Performance Evaluation: Evidence from the 2006 Pay Disclosure Reforms
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 luck presents…
Do Targeted Business Tax Subsidies Achieve Expected Benefits?
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 wages, and number…
Financial Reporting Quality, Turnover Risk, and Wage Differentials: Evidence from Worker-level Data
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 workers demand…
The Innovation Consequences of Mandatory Patent Disclosures
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 reveal more…
Expectations Management and Stock Returns
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 beatable levels…
Going Public in China: Reverse Mergers Versus IPOs
We study firms that go public through reverse mergers (RMs) versus initial public offerings …
On the Economics of Mandatory Audit Partner Rotation and Tenure: Evidence from PCAOB Data
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 production. On average,…
Active Funds and Bundled News
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…
Loan Portfolio Risk and Capital Adequacy: A New Approach to Evaluating the Riskiness of Banks
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…
Do Firms Strategically Internalize Disclosure Spillovers? Evidence from Cash-Financed M&As
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 disclosures…
Salient or safe: why do predicted stock issuers (PSIs) earn low returns?
Breaking It Down: Competitive Costs of Cost Disclosures
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 perceive these…
The Effect of Innovation Box regimes on Income Shifting and Real Activity
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. Using a matched…
Tick Size Tolls: Can a Trading Slowdown Improve Price Discovery?
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 “Tick Size Pilot”…
Where’s the Greenium?
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 2013, over $23…
Peer Group Choice and Chief Executive Officer Compensation
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 retain top…
Non-Answers During Conference Calls
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, about 11% of…
Not All Debt is Created Equal: On the Mental Accounting of Debt Forms
Abstract coming soon.
Scaling Up: The Implementation of Corporate Governance in Pre-IPO Companies
Companies are required to have a reliable system of corporate governance in place at the time of IPO in order to protect the interests of public company investors and stakeholders. Yet, relatively little is known about the process by which they…
Risk Disclosure, Liquidity, and Investment Efficiency
In this paper, I study the impact of a firm’s risk disclosure on investors’ desire to acquire information about the firm. I first show that risk disclosure complements private learning by enabling sophisticated investors to acquire information…