Is the decision to go public or private a stock-market-driven “sideshow” or does it have significant effects on investment and profitability? We address this issue using a comprehensive data set of private and public companies in the U.K. during 1996–2006. Firms with high...

We first develop a theory-based metric to judge the popularity of value weighting in a stock market. We then use our metric to document that although value weighting is less popular in emerging markets than in developed markets, its popularity is increasing almost everywhere. Finally, as we have...

I develop new results for long-horizon predictive regressions with overlapping observations. I show that rather than using autocorrelation robust standard errors, the standard <italic>t</italic>-statistic can simply be divided by the square root of the forecasting horizon to correct for the effects of the...

This paper proposes a measure of ex ante equity premium, IPOFDR, which is the average difference between the initial public offering (IPO) offer price and the 1st-trading-day close price. I test the idea in 3 ways. First, there is a positive relation between IPOFDR and future market returns....

We study the role played by the informal links, or “connections,” between the chief executive officer (CEO) and the divisional managers of conglomerate organizations. Using data on a large sample of multisegment U.S. corporations from 1996 to 2004, we show that segments run by connected...

Neuroeconomics research shows that brain areas that generate emotional states also process information about risk, rewards, and punishments, suggesting that emotions influence financial decisions in a predictable and parsimonious way. We find that positive emotional states such as excitement...

We examine the relation between chief executive officers’ equity incentives and their use of performance-sensitive debt contracts. These contracts require higher or lower interest payments when the borrower’s performance deteriorates or improves, thereby increasing expected costs of...

We study optimal replacement and abandonment decisions for real assets, when both revenues and costs are uncertain and deteriorate with age. We develop an implicit representation of the renewal boundary as the solution to a set of simultaneous equations. This quasi-analytical method has the...

The recent credit crisis has highlighted the importance of market liquidity and its interaction with the price of credit risk. We investigate this interaction by relating the liquidity of corporate bonds to the basis between the credit default swap (CDS) spread of the issuer and the...

Using stock returns around recommendation changes to measure the information produced by analysts, I find that analysts produce more firm-specific than industry-level information. Analysts produce more firm-specific information on stocks with higher idiosyncratic return volatilities. The amount...