There is a debate on whether executive pay reflects rent extraction due to quot;managerial powerquot; or is the result of arms-length bargaining in a principal-agent framework. In this paper we offer a test of the managerial power hypothesis by empirically examining the CEO compensation of U.S....

We model the conditional mean and volatility of stock returns as a latent vector autoregressive (VAR) process to study the contemporaneous and intertemporal relationship between expected returns and risk in a flexible statistical framework and without relying on exogenous predictors. We find a...

We assess the impact of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 on corporate investment in an investment Euler equation framework, where a dummy for the passage of the Act is allowed to affect the rate at which managers discount future investment payoffs. Using generalized method of moments estimators,...

We examine the role of information-based stock trading in affecting the risk-incentive relation. By incorporating an endogenous informed trading into an optimal incentive contracting model, we analytically show that, apart from reducing incentives, a greater risk increases the level of...

We document that the value-weighted aggregate discretionary accruals have significant power in predicting the one-year-ahead stock market returns between 1965 and 2004. The predictive relation is stable and robust to different ways to measure market returns and discretionary accruals as well as...

Santa-Clara and Valkanov (2003) document that excess returns on the stock market are puzzlingly higher under Democratic presidential administrations. We examine whether differences in economic fundamentals can account for this presidential puzzle. We find that the role for fundamentals crucially...

Recent research, including Santa-Clara and Valkanov (2003), has concluded that there is a stable, robust and significant relationship between Democratic presidential administrations and robust stock returns. These conclusions are largely based on OLS estimates of the difference in returns across...

Despite powerful advances in yield curve modeling in the last twenty years, comparatively little attention has been paid to the key practical problem of forecasting the yield curve. In this paper we do so. We use neither the no-arbitrage approach, which focuses on accurately fitting the cross...

The popular Nelson-Siegel (1987) yield curve is routinely fit to cross sections of intra-country bond yields, and Diebold and Li (2006) have recently proposed a dynamized version. In this paper we extend Diebold-Li to a global context, modeling a potentially large set of country yield curves in...

This paper examines the relative importance of the stock return's stock-specific component versus its common-factor component in explaining the momentum profits. Using a model nesting both Chordia and Shivakumar (2002) and Grundy and Martin (2001), we demonstrate that the Fama-French...