In this paper we propose a measure of managerial ability, based on managers' efficiency in generating revenues, which is available for a large sample of firms and outperforms existing ability measures. We find that our measure is strongly associated with manager fixed effects, and that the stock...

In recent years, quarterly earnings guidance has been harshly criticized for inducing managerial short-termism and other ills. Managers are, therefore, urged by influential institutions to cease guidance. We examine empirically the causes of such guidance cessation and find that poor operating...

We hypothesize that the root cause of many goodwill write-offs - managers' public admission of ill-advised corporate acquisitions - is the overpriced shares of buyers at acquisition. Overpriced shares provide managers with strong incentives to invest, and particularly to acquire businesses, even...

A paper presented at the July 2002 conference Economic Statistics: New Needs for the Twenty-First Century, cosponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Conference on Research in Income and Wealth, and the National Association for Business Economics

Estimates and projections are embedded in most financial statement items. These estimates potentially improve the relevance of financial information by providing managers the means to convey to investors forward-looking, inside information (e.g., on future collections from customers via the bad...

This study examines the impact of corporate philanthropy growth on sales growth using a large sample of charitable contributions made by U.S. public companies from 1989 through 2000. Applying Granger causality tests, we find that charitable contributions are significantly associated with future...

In this paper we study the integer-valued autoregressive model, which belongs to the class of thinning models with count data.We mainly focus on the random coefficient integer-valued autoregressive (RCINAR) model and propose a conditional least absolute deviation (CL1) method to estimate the...

This paper presents experimental studies on a solar-assisted ground coupled heat pump (SAGCHP) system for space heating. The system was installed at the Hebei Academy of Sciences in Shijiazhuang (lat. N38°03′, long. E114°26′), China. Solar collectors are in series connection with the...

Past studies of the relationships between economic activity and geography have been hampered by limited spatial data on economic activity. This study presents revised data on global economic activity, the G-Econ database, which measures economic activity for the entire globe, measured at a 1°...

Pathway or gene set analysis has become an increasingly popular approach for analyzing high-throughput biological experiments such as microarray gene expression studies. The purpose of pathway analysis is to identify differentially expressed pathways associated with outcomes. Important...