In this paper we contribute to a line of literature that examines behavioral biases that impact important corporate decisions. Our paper builds on prior articles that examine heaping or rounding of EPS forecasts. Herrmann and Thomas (2005), Bamber, Hui and Yeung (2010) and Dechow and You (2012)...

We use the staggered enactment of anti-recharacterization laws as a plausibly exogenous shock to the value of securitizing collateral through Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) and test how collateral values impact corporate risk management. Following the laws’ enactment, we find increases in...

Growing evidence suggests that managers select financial policies partially by mimicking the financial policies of peer firms. This paper documents that the use of these peer effects in capital structure choice is unique to firms operating in a weak external corporate governance environment....

We document that product market threats increase the use of leased capital. We use Chinese import penetration in an instrumental variables setting to address endogeneity concerns. The positive relation between product market threats and leases is larger for firms that are financially...

We examine whether nominal stock price can help to explain the ex-dividend day anomaly. We find that stocks with lower nominal prices have ex-dividend day price drops that are more consistent with theoretical predictions based on an efficient market. After controlling for factors that have been...

We document new evidence that the ex-dividend day stock price behavior in the U.S. is inconsistent with the tax explanation in several aspects. We find that within a tick multiple, as dividend size increases, dividend yields increase, but the price-drop-to-dividend ratios decrease. For dividends...

We examine ex-dividend day behavior on the Copenhagen Stock Exchange. We report price drop ratios of 25%, well below the 70-80% from U.S. data. The tax clientele hypothesis predicts ratios between 57% and 126% based on the Danish tax structure. Our results conflict with tax and tick size models,...

The Carhart four-factor model is the most widely used risk adjusted performance metric for mutual fund returns. Recent papers find the four-factor model generates significant alphas and factor loadings for unmanaged stock market indexes. In this paper, we introduce a new methodology to eliminate...