Managers use derivatives to reduce cash flow volatility and achieve earnings smoothing. In 1998, FASB issued SFAS No. 133, under which firms are no longer allowed to simultaneously record all offsetting gains and losses on the items being hedged. Thus, critics argued that this treatment could...

Short sellers assist in impounding negative news more quickly into stock prices and improve price informativeness. However, there is a lack of consistent evidence about whether short sellers trade predominantly in anticipation of, or in response to, a public information release. To shed light on...

This paper studies, in a dynamic agency setting, how incentives and contractual efficiency are affected by leading indicators of firms' future financial performance. In our two-period model, a leading indicator variable provides a noisy forecast of the uncertain return from the manager's...

What are the incentives faced by local officials in China? Without democratic institutions, there is no mechanism for local residents to exercise "voice". Given the hukou registration system, local residents have little opportunity to threaten "exit" if they are unhappy with local taxes and...

Observed economic policies in developing countries differ sharply both from those observed among developed countries and from those forecast by existing models of optimal policies. For example, developing countries rely little on broad-based taxes, and make substantial use of tariffs and...

We use a modified corporate risk management framework (e.g., Froot and Stein, 1998) to understand how inefficient risk sharing between firms and employees leads to aggressive investment policies of defined corporate pensions as well as their declining popularity. For reasonable parameter values,...

In this study, we examine the association between supplier concentration and cost flexibility and how such association varies with the buyer firm's bargaining power and the nature of buyer-supplier relationship. Drawing on prior literature, we predict that there is a positive association between...

Agency MBSs with diverse characteristics are traded in parallel with individualized specified pool (SP) contracts and standardized to-be-announced (TBA) contracts. This parallel trading environment has distinctive effects on MBS pricing and trading: (1) Although cheapest-to-deliver (CTD) issues...

Asset heterogeneity is widely believed to hurt the liquidity in markets of many important fixed-income assets such as corporate and municipal bonds. We develop a model in which heterogeneous assets are traded with search friction to study the impact of a quasi-consolidated (QC) trading design in...

We develop a model of dealer-intermediated over-the-counter (OTC) markets in which customers choose their relationship dealers and dealers choose their levels of expertise, thereby determining the market structure and price informativeness jointly. We find that, in general, multiple equilibria...