Earnings provide important information for investment decisions. Thus, executives--who are monitored by investors, directors, customers, and suppliers--acting in self-interest and at times for shareholders, have strong incentives to manage earnings. The authors introduce behavioral thresholds...

We investigate the transition from private to public ownership of companies that had previously been subject to leveraged buyouts. As they go to the public markets for equity, such firms face an information asymmetry problem. Behavioral effects are also likely to be at work. We show that the...

In 1997, France T‚l‚com, the state-owned French telephone company, went through a partial privatization. The government offered current and prior France T‚l‚com employees the opportunity to buy portfolios of shares with various combinations of discounts, required holding periods,...

Private equity firms increasingly sell companies to each other in secondary buyouts (SBOs). We examine commonly expressed concerns regarding SBOs using novel and unique datasets. SBOs made by buyers under pressure to spend capital (a minority of transactions) underperform and destroy value for...

Equity research analysts tend to cover firms about which they have favorable views. We exploit this tendency to infer analysts' preferences for corporate policies from their coverage decisions. We then use exogenous analyst disappearances to examine the effect of these preferences on corporate...