This paper studies the impact of corporate acquisitions - both domestic and cross-border - on the uncertainty faced by acquiring firms. We use data for UK publicly-listed firms from 2004 to 2017 and employ a matching estimator combined with difference-in-differences to control for the endogenous...

This paper examines the relationship between stock and option markets around SEO events. We compare option-implied volatility and realized volatility to show that option markets do not fully predict risk dynamics following equity issues. Moreover, we show that straddle strategies that explore...

The credit default swaps (CDS) market provides a trading venue for downside price movement. We find that future stock price crashes are less frequent after the inception of CDS trading on the firm's debt. The causal effect of CDS trading on stock crash risk is supported by multiple approaches,...

I use intraday prices to explore the time-varying characteristic of the systematic risk around unscheduled firm-level news writing about secondary equity offering (SEO) programs. I show that, around this information flow, the beta drops by a statistically significant and economically important...

We estimate how an acquiring firm’s risk changes depending on whether the market initially judges the acquisition to be neutral, strongly negative, or strongly positive for the shareholders of the acquiring firm. We find that for an average neutral acquisition, the annualized standard...

In a large sample of public-public acquisitions, target valuation changes between their 52-week highs and just prior to the acquisition announcements are positively related to acquirer announcement returns. I contend that prior target valuation changes are measures of target valuation...

Releases of key macroeconomic indicators are closely watched by financial markets. We investigate the role of expectation dispersion and economic uncertainty for the stock-market reaction to indicator releases. We find that the strength of the financial market response to news decreases with the...

We examine whether monetary policy uncertainty influences the reaction of the equity, Treasury security, foreign exchange and crude oil markets, as well as medium-term interest rates, to U.S macroeconomic announcements. Using intraday futures data, we show that in the presence of higher policy...

This paper investigates how the disclosure tone of earnings conference calls predicts future stock price crash risk. Using U.S. public firm earnings conference call transcripts from 2010 to 2015, we find that firms exhibiting more pessimistic tone during the current year-end call experience...