Shares trading in the Bolsa Mexicana de Valores do not seem to react to company news. Using a sample of Mexican corporate news announcements from the period July 1994 through June 1997, this paper finds that there is nothing unusual about returns, volatility of returns, trading volume, or...

This paper models a family business as a household operating a production technology in which the household's human capital is a specific business skill. Each generation in the household can either bequeath the business and the business skill to the next generation, or sell the business through...

This paper explains how the actions of skeptical traders can make manipulable earnings reports informative. Our model consists of a price-maximizing manager who chooses a cheap talk report, a profit-maximizing trader who may then seek costly information, and competitive market makers. Since the...

This paper models a family business as a household operating a production technology in which the household's human capital is a specific business skill. Each generation in the household can either bequeath the business and the business skill to the next generation, or sell the business through...

Shares trading in the Bolsa Mexicana de Valores do not seem to react to company news. Using a sample of Mexican corporate news announcements from the period July 1994 to June 1997, this paper finds that there is nothing unusual about returns, volatility of returns, volume of trade or bid-ask...

This paper provides a model to explain how suspicion in capital markets may alleviate moral hazard in unverifiable managerial disclosures. We model a stylized market as a non-cooperative game among three classes of agents: competitive risk-neutral market makers who set prices; a manager with...

On June 27, 2002, the Securities and Exchange Commission of the United States ordered the CEOs and CFOs of 688 large firms to certify the earnings numbers of their companies by 5:30PM EST, August 14, 2002. This paper uses this natural experiment to find that certification was not only a...

We estimate the number of immigrants in the United States classified by their country of origin from census data in 1970, 1980, 1990 and 2000. We find, both in cross-sectional tests and in panel data tests, that the size of the immigrant group from a country living in the U.S. is positively...

Why is the mere announcement of an open-market share repurchase program, which involves no commitment to purchase shares, regarded as good news by the market? The first part of this paper provides a theoretical model to resolve this puzzle. The model predicts that firms with large underpricing...

Using a sample of all top management who were indicted for illegal insider trading in the United States for trades during the period 1989-2002, we explore the economic rationality of this white-collar crime. If this crime is an economically rational activity in the sense of Becker (1968), where...