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SSRN Research Paper Series
The Social Science Research Network’s Research Paper Series includes working papers produced by Stanford GSB the Rock Center.
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Retired or Fired: How Can Investors Tell If a CEO Was Pressured to Leave?
CEO succession at many companies occurs in a black box. Shareholders are not privy to boardroom discussions prior to the announcement of a CEO departure, and press releases announcing the change contain boilerplate language that does not make it…
Robo-Journalism and Capital Markets
In 2014, the Associated Press (AP) began using algorithms to write media articles about firms’ earnings announcements. These “robo-journalism” articles synthesize information from firms’ press releases, analyst reports, and stock performance, and…
Repatriation Taxes and Foreign Cash Holdings: The Impact of Anticipated Tax Reform
We examine whether anticipation of a repatriation tax reduction affects the amount of cash U.S. multinational corporations (MNCs) hold overseas. We find that U.S. MNCs most likely to benefit from a repatriation tax reduction accumulated…
Stock Price Management and Share Issuance: Evidence from Equity Warrants
We address whether firms manage stock prices in anticipation of share issuances. A literature in finance attributes negative returns following share issuances to market timing, whereas studies in accounting interpret similar return patterns as…
Bank Earnings and Regulatory Capital Management using Available for Sale Securities
Based on a large sample of publicly listed and non-listed US commercial banks from 1996 to 2011, we find robust evidence consistent with banks using realized available for sale (AFS) securities gains and losses to smooth earnings and increase low…
A Re-examination of the Informational Role of Earnings Announcements
No abstract available
Relating Product Prices to Long-Run Marginal Cost: Evidence from Solar Photovoltaic Modules
A basic tenet of microeconomics is that for a competitive industry in equilibrium the market price of a product will be equal to its marginal cost. This paper develops a model framework and a corresponding empirical inference procedure for…
The Economic Consequences Associated with Integrated Report Quality: Capital Market and Real Effects
The International Integrated Reporting Council’s Framework identifies two goals for integrated reporting: improved information for outside providers of financial capital and better internal decision making. We extend prior research that finds a…
From Boardroom to C-Suite: Why Would a Company Pick a Current Director as CEO?
Many observers consider the most important responsibility of the board of directors its responsibility to hire and fire the CEO. To this end, an interesting situation arises when a CEO resigns and the board chooses neither an internal nor…
Evolution in Value Relevance of Accounting Information
We find the value relevance of accounting information has increased between 1962 and 2014. The information we consider comprises twelve accounting amounts plus ten industry indicators. Regarding individual accounting amounts, we find that…
Asymmetric Timeliness and the Resolution of Investor Disagreement and Uncertainty at Earnings Announcements
This study finds that greater asymmetric timeliness of earnings is associated with slower resolution of investor disagreement and uncertainty at earnings announcements. These findings indicate that a potential cost of asymmetric timeliness is…
Mutual Funds and Short-Sellers: Why does short-sale volume predict stock returns?
Daily directional trading by mutual funds (MFs) is highly-persistent and price-destabilizing, leading to return reversals lasting months. This effect is distinct from the “flow-induced trading” phenomenon in prior studies. At the same…
Group Affiliation and Default Prediction
Using a large sample of business groups from several countries around the world, we show that group information matters for parent and subsidiary default prediction. Group firms may support each other when in financial distress. Potential group…
The Contribution of Bank Regulation and Fair Value Accounting to Procyclical Leverage
Our analytical description of how banks’ responses to asset price changes can result in procyclical leverage reveals that for banks with a binding regulatory leverage constraint, absent differences in regulatory risk weights across assets,…
The JOBS Act and Information Uncertainty in IPO Firms
This study examines the effect of the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act (JOBS Act) on information uncertainty in IPO firms. The JOBS Act creates a new category of issuer, the Emerging Growth Company (EGC), and exempts EGCs from several…
Bankruptcy in Groups
We examine bankruptcy within business groups. Groups have incentives to support financially distressed subsidiaries as the bankruptcy of a subsidiary may impose severe costs on the group as a whole. In several countries around the world,…
Political Connections and the Informativeness of Insider Trades
This paper examines the relation between political connections and informed trading by corporate insiders in the context of the Financial Crisis. The unprecedented magnitude of government intervention, the substantial impact of this intervention…
CEO Personality and Firm Policies
Based on two samples of high quality personality data for chief executive officers (CEOs), we use linguistic features extracted from conferences calls and statistical learning techniques to develop a measure of CEO personality in terms of the Big…
Enabling Mini-Grid Development in Rural India
Rural electrification rates in India lag behind government goals, in part due to the inability of distribution companies (discoms) to fund central grid expansion. In the absence of central grid electrification, mini-grids offer significant…
Banks as Tax Planning Intermediaries
We provide the first large-sample evidence of banks playing an important role in facilitating tax planning by client firms. Capturing bank-client relationships using lending contracts and measuring borrower tax avoidance with the three-year cash…