In this paper, we study a setting where a firm (principal) is privately informed of the firm's potential and contracts with an agent to supply unobservable effort. We show it can be optimal for the firm to have loose monitoring in the sense that the monitoring system is less perfect than what is...

This paper studies the role of conservative accounting standards in alleviating rational yet dysfunctional unobservable earnings manipulation. We show that when accounting numbers serve both the valuation role (in which potential investors use accounting reports to assess a firm's expected...

We study the disclosure strategy of a firm's manager who may privately observe two signals that are informative about the firm's prospects. The two signals correspond to the firm's two business segments and are observationally correlated, i.e. the observation of one affects the likelihood of...

type="main" <title type="main">ABSTRACT</title> <p>This paper analyzes the effects of public information in a perfect competition trading model populated by asymmetrically informed short-horizon investors with different levels of private information precision. We first show that information asymmetry reduces the amount of...</p>

Theoretical work in financial economics suggests that payoff complementarities lead to financial fragility. Indeed, phenomena like bank runs and currency attacks are often attributed to the feature that investors are better off taking the same action taken by other investors. Due to data...

Stock prices and real investments are highly correlated. Previous literature has offered two main explanations for this high correlation. The first explanation relies on price being informative about investment opportunities, the second one is based on financing constraints. In this paper we...

Bayesian learning implies decreasing weights on prior beliefs and increasing weights on track records, as the latter become more precise. We test whether investors learn about analyst predictive ability in this manner by examining market reactions to analysts' forecasts. Consistent with...

<heading id="h1" level="1" implicit="yes" format="display">ABSTRACT</heading>This paper studies the role of conservative accounting standards in alleviating rational yet dysfunctional unobservable earnings manipulation. We show that when accounting numbers serve both the valuation role (in which potential investors use accounting reports to assess a firm's...