Working Papers

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…

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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 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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

This paper examines the effect of market participants’ information processing costs on firms’ disclosure choice. Using the recent eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) regulation as an exogenous shock to these information processing costs…

There are many studies where researchers are interested in estimating average treatment effects and are willing to rely on the unconfoundedness assumption, which requires that treatment assignment is as good as random conditional on pre-treatment…

Institutional investors pay considerable attention to the quality of a company’s governance. Unfortunately, it is difficult for outside observers to reliably gauge governance quality. Oftentimes, poor governance manifests itself only after…

Keller Williams is one of the most successful real estate franchises in the world. The leaders of the company attribute its growth in large part to a cultural model that emphasizes profit sharing, interdependence, and success through the efforts…