Credit rating agencies (CRAs) have considerable privileged access to corporate management and are therefore a potentially important source of information to the equity market. We study how stock analysts incorporate bond ratings in their earnings forecasts. We develop an economic framework for...

Researchers argue that analysts’ information acquisition activities increase firm value through reducing agency costs, i.e., the monitoring effect (Jensen and Meckling 1976; Healy and Palepu 2001). However, the existing empirical evidence on analyst monitoring effect is limited and inconclusive....

This paper investigates how supply chain management (SCM) efficiency affects the value investors attach to the change in a company's inventory holdings. Based on a large number of U.S. firms from 1971 to 2013, we find that, on average, one dollar of inventory change is valued at $0.507 in the...

This paper investigates whether markets for individual stocks lose liquidity when uninformed investors are given options to avoid trading against informed investors. I find a positive association between the percentage of firm shares being held by exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and illiquidity in...

Many recent studies explore how earnings properties such as opacity, conservatism, and comparability relate to stock price crash risk. Motivated by the importance of earnings guidance as a voluntary disclosure mechanism that directly provides new information to the market, we investigate how...

Prior studies show that managerial entrenchment deteriorates the credibility of earnings, hence reducing the value relevance of earnings. However, prior literature documents that the likelihood of earnings management is lower in firms with more antitakeover provisions since entrenched managers...