Managers appear to manipulate firm earnings through their characterizations of pension assets to capital markets and alter investment decisions to justify, and capitalize on, these manipulations. Managers are more aggressive with assumed long-term rates of return when their assumptions have a...

Many investors purchase mutual funds through intermediated channels, paying brokers or financial advisors for fund selection and advice. This article attempts to quantify the benefits that investors enjoy in exchange for the costs of these services. We study broker-sold and direct-sold funds...

We use the Business Roundtable’s challenge to the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC’s) 2010 proxy access rule as a natural experiment to measure the value of shareholder proxy access. We find that firms that would have been most vulnerable to proxy access, as measured by...

We use the federal tax codes from 1926 through 2009 to construct the after-tax returns that individual investors, corporations, and broker–dealers would have generated on a set of benchmark portfolios. Portfolio strategies differ in the pace of capital gains realizations. This creates...