Top sportsmen often refer to competition against other top sportsmen as a motivation to exert more effort. We examine whether a similar pattern exists among another group of top professionals – star analysts. Our evidence suggests that star analysts concentrate their efforts and generate...

We examine the performance of acquirers who hire an advisor that employs a “star” analyst covering the target (i.e., “star-crossed” deals) and show that such deals have lower abnormal announcement returns (2.1%), lower total acquisition returns (8.9%), and greater subsequent goodwill...

It is conventionally perceived in the literature that weak analysts are likely to under-weight their private information and strategically bias their announcements in the direction of the public beliefs to avoid scenarios where their private information turns out to be wrong, whereas strong...

One finding of recent empirical studies is that financially distressed stocks have large dispersion in their book to market value of equity (BM) ratios. In this paper we provide an explanation based entirely on rational decision making by investors. Our main argument is that the likelihood of a...

Past literature suggests that success rates in professional basketball are independent of past performance and has been interpreted as evidence that the commonly-shared belief in Hot Hands (HH) is a cognitive illusion. This is often cited as evidence of biased decision-making even when financial...

AbstractFama and French (2006) use the dividend discount model to develop the joint role of three variables – expected profitability, expected investment and current BM – in predicting future stock returns. One reported empirical result is anomalous. The valuation model establishes that the...

We study the dynamics of initial public offerings (IPOs) by examining the tradeoff between an entrepreneur's private benefits, which are lost whenever the firm is publicly traded, and the gains from diversification. We characterize the timing dimension of the decision to go public and its impact...

Empirical investigations of the agency costs of dispersed ownership yield mixed results. A possible explanation for the lack of conclusive evidence is inaccurate measurement of the extent of the problem. We suggest that the extent of the problem be measured as theory suggests: by the wealth...