Firms often use non-linear incentive systems to motivate workers to achieve specified goals, such as paying bonuses to reach targets in sales, production, or cost reduction. Using administrative data from a major Chinese insurance firm that raised its sales targets and rewards for insurance...

Firms often use non-linear incentive systems to motivate workers to achieve specified goals, such as paying bonuses to reach targets in sales, production, or cost reduction. Using administrative data from a major Chinese insurance firm that raised its sales targets and rewards for insurance...

We fit U.S. stock market volatilities on macroeconomic and financial market indicators and some industry level financial ratios. Stock market volatility is non-Gaussian distributed. It can be approximated by an inverse Gaussian (IG) distribution or it can be transformed by Box-Cox transformation...

We construct a measure of abnormal relative attention (ARA), reflecting unusual changes in attention paid to a stock by local relative to non-local investors, to measure local information advantages. An increase in this measure predicts higher returns in the short term. This predictive power is...

This paper documents a new high risk-low return puzzle. Specfically, we find that a forward-looking risk measure extracted from credit line undrawn spreads negatively predicts borrowers' future stock returns. This negative risk-return relation is separate from previously documented asset pricing...

This paper documents novel evidence that private debt contains value-relevant nonpublic information with significant economic value. We extract banks' private information from term loan spreads. Abnormal loan spreads significantly predict firms' future operating performance and uncertainty...