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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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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…
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…
In this paper, I develop an option-pricing model that formally incorporates a disclosure event. Using the model, I first theoretically examine how two properties of the disclosure — its overall informativeness and its…
We examine the long-term effects of interventions by activist hedge funds. Prior papers document positive equal-weighted long-term returns and operating performance improvements following activist interventions, and typically…
This study reports on the current state-of-affairs in the funding of entrepreneurship and innovations in China and provides a broad survey of academic findings on the subject. We discuss the implications of these findings for…
Proxy advisory firms have significant influence over the voting decisions of institutional investors and the governance choices of publicly traded companies. However, it is not clear that the recommendations of these firms are…
The hallmark of good corporate governance is an independent board of directors to oversee management. However, it is not clear that independent directors receive the information they need to make fully informed decisions on all…
Most investors have a single goal: to earn the highest financial return. These socially-neutral investors maximize their risk-adjusted returns and would not accept a lower financial return from an investment that also produced…
I evaluate the role of accrual accounting in improving rms’ production decisions and resource allocation across rms. I introduce both cash ow and accounting earnings as imperfect measures of performance into a general equilibrium…
Whether fair value accounting should be used in financial reporting has been the subject of debate for many years. A key dimension to this debate is whether fair value earnings can provide information to financial statement users…
The board of directors is expected to ensure that management has identified and developed processes to mitigate risks facing the organization, including risks arising from data theft and the loss of information. Unfortunately…
We consider a cheap talk setting with two senders and a continuum of receivers with heterogeneous preferences. Receivers listen to just one sender, but can choose which sender to listen to. We determine that: (i) full…
This study examines the factors contributing to a striking increase in information content of quarterly earnings announcements, measured as the absolute magnitude of stock price revision at earnings announcements relative to price…
This paper finds evidence of return predictability across technology-linked firms. Employing a classic measure of technological closeness between firms, we show that the returns of technology-linked firms have strong predictive…
Using a comprehensive sample of reverse merger (RM) transactions, we examine the effects of China’s IPO regulations on the prices and returns of its publicly listed stocks. During 2007-2015, unlisted Chinese firms paid an average…
Many irreversible long-run capital investments entail opportunities for managers to respond flexibly to changes in the economic environment. However, common levelized cost measures used to guide decision-making, such as the…
The fabrication and manufacturing of industrial commodities such as iron, glass and cement is carbon-intensive. A major reason capture of carbon dioxide from flue gases of industrial processes has not been widely adopted as a…
Forthcoming in The Review of Financial Studies I analyze a model in which risk-averse investors trade on signals regarding both a stock’s expected payoffs and its risk. These investors may trade in the stock and a derivative whose…
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…
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…