Using several different methodologies, we quantify the statistical robustness of variables used in prior research to explain initial IPO returns. We establish a parsimonious list of robust variables and evaluate their implications for different theories of IPO underpricing and clustering....

Prior research suggests that executive option grants that do not quickly vest provide managers with better incentives to pursue long-term, instead of short-term, objectives. Previous research also suggests that the pursuit of long-term objectives could be undermined by the risk of early...

Prior literature on highly levered transactions (levered buyouts or levered recapitalizations) has emphasized either changes in governance or the structuring of their financing in helping these firms avoid financial distress or bankruptcy. Observing a sample of HLTs over time, we observe that...

We provide a model of television advertising based on an explicit characterization of an advertisement's contribution to an advertiser's profits that suggests that each program faces a downward sloping demand for its ad time. Hence Fournier and Martin's (1983) "law of one price" does not hold in...

<link rid="b7">Brennan and Franks (1997)</link> and <link rid="b26">Stoughton and Zechner (1998)</link> provide contrasting arguments for why monitoring considerations create incentives for managers to underprice their firms' IPOs (initial public offerings). Like <link rid="b25">Smart and Zutter (2003)</link>, we examine these arguments using a sample of U.S....

Using data on 560 firm-commitment initial public offerings of common stock for the 1982-1983 period, we find that the cross-sectional distribution of one-day returns is modeled better as a mixture of two distributions, with the parameter estimates of one distribution being consistent with...