Several recent papers have documented the benefits of Debtor-in-possession (DIP) financing in the restructuring of firms in Chapter 11. However, the view on benefits is not unanimous and some legal scholars have raised doubts about DIP financing's effects on debt-holders and the possibility of...

In this paper, we examine the relative explanatory power of three motivations for firms to remain debt free - managerial entrenchment, need for financial flexibility, and credit constraints. Consistent with the hypothesis that they lack access to debt markets, these firms are small, young,...

This study complements existing research on the information content of dividends by focusing on the use of dividend expectations. We derive a measure of unexpected dividend changes, called dividend surprises, based on Value Line forecasts. Our results highlight a potentially serious sample...

We document the existence of another seasonality in stock returns: A November effect. The uniqueness of this study is that the November effect is observed only after the passage of the Tax Reform Act of 1986. The impact of the Act resides in the treatment and distribution of capital gains and...

Several recent papers have documented the benefits of debtor-in-possession (DIP) financing in the restructuring of firms in Chapter 11. However, the view on benefits is not unanimous and some legal scholars have raised doubts about DIP financing's effects on debt-holders and the possibility of...

A number of papers (notably Fama and French (1993, 1995)) find that non-market risk factors, such as size and the book-to-market ratio, are priced by investors. We test whether these other risk factors are merely proxies for omitted higher-order market-risk factors. Using size-sorted portfolio...

A growing literature contends that, because returns are not normal, higher-order co-moments matter to risk-averse investors. Fama and French (1993, 1995) find that nonmarket risk factors based on size and book-to-market ratio are priced by investors. We test the hypothesis that the Fama-French...