This study examines whether the earnings quality of a firm that first announces quarterly earnings in its industry impacts the magnitude of intra-industry information transfers. Prior research shows that higher quality earnings better reflect the operating fundamentals of a firm. I argue that...

The two essays in this dissertation study issues related to debt contracting. The first essay examines whether aspects of debt contracting have been affected by the provisions of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 that increased monitoring of management's activities by independent directors,...

We consider a monopolist selling durable goods to consumers with unit demands but different preferences for quality. The seller can offer items of different quality at the same time to induce buyers to self-select, as in Mussa-Rosen (1978), but is not artificially constrained to offer only one...

Using a Verreccia [1983]-type model, we study the optimal voluntary disclosure strategy of a manager with private information that helps the market interpret financial information the firm is required to report. In equilibrium, the manager’s disclosure strategy enhances upward or mitigates...

This paper examines the impact of Regulation Fair Disclosure (Reg FD) on the competitive advantage of All-Star analysts. We find that Institutional Investor All-Americans, chosen by the votes of institutional investors based on overall helpfulness to the buy-side, experienced a significant...

We reexamine the descriptive ability of the conventional wisdom that earnings announcements made after trading and on Friday are dominated by bad news in light of the 24/7 media coverage and other technological changes of the 1990’s. We find that the change in media coverage has facilitated a...

In most times and places, women on average marry men who are older than themselves. We propose a partial explanation for this difference and for why it is diminishing. In a society where the economic roles of males are more varied and specialized than the roles of females, it may be that the...

As part of a broad competitive intelligence strategy, firms expect to acquire information about their rivals’ customers and production processes. In this study, we examine the firms’ incentives to disclose this information. We find that firms adopt a policy of disclosing their information...

In many situations, one party can monitor a second party and chooses how much monitoring to do. However, in many of these situations, monitoring by other parties can (imperfectly) substitute for monitoring by the first party. As a result, the first party may attempt to "free ride" on the...

We model firms as competing for socially responsible consumers by linking the provision of a public good (environmentally friendly or socially responsible activities) to sales of their private goods. In many cases, too little of the public good is provided but under certain conditions,...