We investigate corporate transparency, defined as the availability of firm-specific information to those outside publicly traded firms. We conceptualize corporate transparency within a country as output from a multifaceted system whose components collectively produce, gather, validate, and...

Motivated by extant finance theory predicting that insider trading crowds out private information acquisition by outsiders, we use data for 100 countries for the years 1987-2000 to study whether analyst following in a country increases following restriction of insider trading activities. We...

This paper investigates how performance risk impacts a board's ability to learn about the unknown talent of a chief executive officer (CEO). We theorize that the information content of performance is increasing in idiosyncratic risk and decreasing in systematic risk. We provide robust empirical...

In this paper, we seek a deeper understanding of how accounting information is used for valuation and incentive contracting purposes. We explore linkages between weights on earnings in compensation contracts and in stock price formation. A distinction between the valuation and incentive...

This paper studies sample design for process control in principal-agent settings where deterrence rather than ex post detection is the main issue. We show how the magnitude of gains from additional sampling can be calculated and traded off against sampling costs. It is shown that the optimal...

This paper introduces a new measure of a firm's exposure to systematic distress risk--the probability of a recession at the time of a firm's failure. For stocks in the top quintile of the probability of failure, a median hedge portfolio based on our measure generates a positive risk premium of...