Prior literature shows that earnings have come to explain less stock price movement over time, suggesting that firm fundamental information has become less important. In this paper, we replace earnings with earnings announcement returns as a measure of firm fundamental news and find that these...

We examine the effects of liquidity, default and personal taxes on the relative yields of Treasuries and municipals using a generalized model with liquidity risk. The municipal yield model includes liquidity as a state factor. Using a unique transaction dataset, we are able to estimate the...

Prior literature observes that information uncertainty exacerbates investor underreaction behavior. In this paper, I investigate whether, as professional investment intermediaries, sell-side analysts suffer more behavioral biases in cases of greater information uncertainty. I show that greater...

There is substantial evidence of short-term stock price continuation, which prior literature often attributes to investor behavioral biases such as underreaction to new information. This paper investigates the role of information uncertainty in short-term CAPM anomalies and cross-sectional...

This article explores the expectations of the credit market by developing a parsimonious default swap model, which is versatile enough to disentangle default probability from the expected recovery rate, accommodate counterparty default risk, and allow flexible correlation between state...

Prior studies find that (i) investors over-weight (or over-estimate the persistence of) past accruals and under-weight past cash flows, and (ii) analysts over-weight past accruals. We study financial analysts' and investors' assessments of the persistence of accruals and cash flows after...

From a credit risk perspective, little is known about the distress factors - economy-wide or firm-specific - that are important in explaining variations in defaultable coupon yields. This paper proposes and empirically tests a family of credit risk models. Empirically, we find that firm-specific...

Consensus analyst target prices are widely available online at no cost to investors. In this paper we consider whether these consensus target prices are informative for predicting future returns. We find that when considered in isolation, consensus target prices are not generally informative...

We explore a new mechanism of earnings management whereby a parent company shifts income from not-wholly-owned subsidiaries to itself to avoid losses. Consolidated net income attributable to the parent company increases if earnings are shifted from not-wholly-owned subsidiaries to the parent, as...

We investigate the joint hypothesis that a) tax expense contains information about core profitability that is incremental to reported earnings and b) that information is reflected in stock prices with a delay. We find that seasonally-differenced quarterly tax expense, our proxy for tax expense...