We investigate the equity valuation effects of social media websites during one of the world's largest events: the Olympics. Using listings of Olympic-firms posted on Chinese social media websites in the years leading up to the Olympics, we identify those firms that are publicly labeled and...

The relative importance of country- and industry-specified factors vis-à-vis company-specific financial-statement-based information in explaining equity valuation multiples in an international setting is examined. Both country-specific effects via previously identified variables and an...

Non-financial performance measures, such as Environmental, Social, and Governance (“ESG”) measures, are potentially leading indicators of firms' financial performance. I draw on the prior academic literature and the concept of ESG materiality to develop new corporate governance and ESG...

This study's underlying premise is that current pension plan accounting has two important negative effects. First, it distorts the measurement of earnings and net worth in the short run, as well as the pattern of earnings over future periods. Second, this distortion can send incorrect signals to...

We examine the value of analyst recommendations across 45 countries and 3.8 million firm-month observations from 1994 to 2019. Recommendation-based portfolio strategies lead to highly significant (insignificant) abnormal returns in international markets (in the U.S.). In line with...

This study empirically examines the role of risk sharing between taxable investors and the government on the relation between capital gains taxes and expected returns. Specifically, using an international panel from 26 countries over the period 1990 to 2004, we find evidence that the general...

Closed-end country funds are interesting in that they have two sets of prices for the same underlying assets – the net asset value (NAV) of the fund holdings as measured using the underlying firms' stock prices in their home markets and the fund price at which the fund trades on a U.S. stock...

The allegation that activist investors demand changes that increase short-term stock prices at the expense of long-term shareholder value (“short-termism”) has led to extensive research on interventions by hedge funds. Few studies include other private (non-hedge fund) activists, even though...

In this paper, we examine international differences in the effect of management forecasts (which we use to proxy for voluntary disclosure) on the cost of equity capital (COC) across 31 countries. We find that the issuance of management forecasts is associated with a lower COC worldwide, but the...

This study investigates whether and how the deviation of cash flow rights (ownership) from voting rights (control), or simply the ownership-control wedge, influences the likelihood that extreme negative outliers occur in stock return distributions, which we refer to as stock price crash risk. We...