Carrizosa and Ryan (2017) explore the use of private information covenants, which contractually oblige borrowers to provide their lenders with private information: projected or intra-quarter financial statements. The authors offer evidence that creditors acquire private information about...

We examine how firms' capital structure choices vary with the presence of dual-class ownership and the degree of disproportional control associated with it. We document that, compared to a propensity-matched sample of single-class firms, dual-class firms have higher leverage, greater propensity...

A dual-class ownership structure, accompanied by disproportional control rights, is traditionally considered to be an inferior form of governance. We examine how the capital structure choices made by dual-class firms (i.e., by their controlling shareholders or insiders), as well as the...

Book value of equity consists of two economically different components: retained earnings and contributed capital. We predict that book-to-market strategies work because the retained earnings component of the book value of equity includes the accumulation and, hence, the averaging of past...

A substantial literature investigates conditional conservatism, defined as asymmetric accounting recognition of economic shocks (“news”), and how it depends on various market, political and institutional variables. Studies typically assume the Basu (1997) asymmetric timeliness coefficient...

Gross profit scaled by book value of total assets predicts the cross-section of average returns. Novy-Marx (2013) concludes that it outperforms other measures of profitability such as bottom-line net income, cash flows, and dividends. One potential explanation for the measure's predictive...