While existing asset pricing studies focus on macroeconomic variables to predict stock market risk premium, we find that an aggregate index of corporate activities has substantially greater predictive power both in- and out-of sample, and yields much greater economic gain for a mean-variance...

We document that the likelihood of asset sales increases with union presence and union wages. Furthermore, acquiring firms gain significant concessions from the incumbent union following asset sales. Finally, the anticipation of union concessions helps explain the excess stock returns around...

I document that operating performance improves following 4,729 announcements of open market share repurchase programs from 1981 through 2000. Moreover, the capital market responds favorably to earnings announcements after the program announcements. Further analysis reveals that both the...

This study investigates the excess funds hypothesis using samples of special dividends, regular dividend increases, and self-tender offers. All three types of firms tend to have funds in excess of industry norms before the events. The excess funds are largely non-recurring for special dividend...

This study investigates capital structure around 286 self-tender offers from 1980 to 1997. Firms that undertake self-tender offers generally have debt ratios below their predicted levels before the offers. The debt ratios following nondefensive self-tender offers are close to predicted levels,...

We examine the impact of social networks when they are likely to be most valuable. We find that firms well-connected to other firms through executives and directors have better performance and more investments during the 2007-2009 financial crisis, and this is especially true among financially...

We examine the effect of product market competition on firms' earnings management practices. Using exogenous variation in import competition, we find that heightened competition reduces both accrual-based and real earnings management. We also show that several measures of competition from past...