While the traditional accounting model is widely believed to inadequatelyaccount for intangibles, managers can voluntarily provide information about them.Based on a sample of companies from East Asia, this thesis investigates the role ofvoluntary non-financial disclosure about intangibles in a...

Thus far, the disaggregation of non-recurring items from earnings has been investigated mostly in the United States, in the context of special items and pro forma earnings. The disclosure of these items is mainly on a voluntary basis. Managers of firms have significant discretion in the...

Recently, Francis, Nanda and Olsson (2008) proposed that earnings quality influence firms’ disclosure decisions. We examine whether Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) disclosure is related to earnings management and if the relationship is mitigated by political cost considerations or by the...

Prior research documents significant negative long-term stock returns following bond-rating downgrades. Some downgraded firms are placed on credit watches before downgrades, and we find that the post-downgrade stock underperformance of such firms is significantly reduced. We explore two...

Dividend distribution enhances information transmission, and mitigates agency conflicts by restricting managers' access to free cash flow, and exposing firms to the scrutiny and monitoring by market participants when raising external capital. The reduction in agency costs and improvement in...

Adding a return factor based on capital investment into standard, calendar-time factor regressions makes underperformance following seasoned equity offerings largely insignificant and reduces its magnitude by 37-46%. The reason is that issuers invest more than nonissuers matched on size and...

An investment factor, long in low investment stocks and short in high investment stocks, helps explain the new issues puzzle. Adding this factor into standard factor regressions reduces substantially the magnitude of the underperformance following equity and debt offerings and the composite...

There is increasing interest in the idea of allocating across factors instead of traditional asset classes. Allocating across factors has the intuitive appeal of allocating across building blocks that are in theory purer sources of return. In practice, factor-based allocation is not easy, since...