We analyze the link between financial reporting choices that affect accruals quality and firms' use of call options. We argue that call options used in compensation arrangements (employee stock options or ESOs) create countervailing incentives for managers to affect accruals quality. On the one...

What is the role of "large players" like hedge funds and other highly leveraged institutions in speculative attacks? In recent theoretical work, large players may induce an attack by an early move, providing information to smaller agents. In contrast, many observers argue that large players are...

Theoretical models predict that overconfident investors will trade more than rational investors. We directly test this hypothesis by correlating individual overconfidence scores with several measures of trading volume of individual investors (number of trades, turnover). Approximately 3,000...

Survey and option data are used to take a new look at the equity premium puzzle. Survey data on equity returns (Livingston survey) shows much lower expected excess returns than ex post data. At the same time, option data (CBOE's VIX) indicates that investors overestimate the volatility of equity...

This paper embeds security design in a model of evolutionary learning. We consider a competitive and perfect financial market where agents, as in Allen and Gale (1988), have heterogeneous valuations for cash flows. Our point of departure is that, instead of assuming that agents are endowed with...

VAR analysis on a measure of bank lending standards collected by the Federal Reserve reveals that shocks to lending standards are significantly correlated with innovations in commercial loans of banks and in real output. Credit standards strongly dominate loan rates in explaining variation in...

Traditional mean-variance efficient portfolios do not capture the potential wealth creation opportunities provided by predictability of asset returns. We propose a simple method for constructing optimally managed portfolios that exploits the possibility that asset returns are predictable. We...

Using a new dataset of bid and offer quotes for credit default swaps, we investigate the relationship between theoretical determinants of default risk and actual market premia using linear regression. These theoretical determinants are firm leverage, volatility and the riskless interest rate. We...

In capital intensive industries, firms face complicated multi-stage financing, investment, and production decisions under the watchful eye of existing and potential industry rivals. We consider a two-stage simplification of this environment. In the first stage, an incumbent firm benefits from...

The average firm going public or issuing new equity has underperformed the market in the long run. Endogeneity of the number of new issues has been proposed as a potential explanation of this long-run underperformance. Under pseudo market timing of new issues, ex post measures of average...