The paper investigates stock return dynamics in an environment where executives have an incentive to maximize their compensation by artificially inflating earnings. A principal-agent model with financial reporting and managerial effort is embedded in a Lucas asset-pricing model with periodic...

The paper investigates stock return dynamics in an environment where executives have an incentive to maximize their compensation by artificially inflating earnings. A principal-agent model with financial reporting and managerial effort is embedded in a Lucas asset-pricing model with periodic...

The paper investigates stock return dynamics in an environment where executives have an incentive to maximize their compensation by artificially inflating earnings. A principal-agent model with financial reporting and managerial effort is embedded in a Lucas asset-pricing model with periodic...

We examine the return information conveyed by a firm’s dividend surprise, defined as the difference between a firm’s actual dividend per share (DPS) and investors’ expected DPS. We find that negative-surprise stocks (i.e., stocks in the lowest dividend surprise quintile) provide 5.64% more...

We document a strong positive cross-sectional relation between corporate bond yield spreads and bond return volatilities. As corporate bond prices are generally attributable to both credit risk and illiquidity as discussed in Huang and Huang (2012), we apply a decomposition methodology to...

We present evidence that market sentiment is positively priced in the cross-section of stock returns in low-sentiment periods. We estimate individual stock exposure to market sentiment and find that, in periods of low market sentiment, stocks in the highest sentiment beta quintile generate a...