Earnings provide important information for investment decisions. Thus, executives--who are monitored by investors, directors, customers, and suppliers--acting in self-interest and at times for shareholders, have strong incentives to manage earnings. The authors introduce behavioral thresholds...

We investigate the transition from private to public ownership of companies that had previously been subject to leveraged buyouts. As they go to the public markets for equity, such firms face an information asymmetry problem. Behavioral effects are also likely to be at work. We show that the...

We survey research on corporate finance in Europe. The ambition is to provide the reader with an overview of what we learned, particularly since the beginning of the 1990s. We focus on two themes: (1) the practice and institutions in Europe are heterogeneous and different from those in the...

In 1997, France T‚l‚com, the state-owned French telephone company, went through a partial privatization. The government offered current and prior France T‚l‚com employees the opportunity to buy portfolios of shares with various combinations of discounts, required holding periods,...

The bookbuilding IPO procedure has captured significant market share from auction alternatives recently, despite the significantly lower costs related to the auction mechanism. In France, where both mechanisms were used in the 1990s, the ostensible advantages of bookbuilding were...

Most real decisions, unlike those of economics texts, have a status quo alternative--that is, doing nothing or maintaining one's current or previous decision. A series of decision-making experiments shows that individuals disproportionately stick with the status quo. Data on the selections of...