This paper documents that the payoffs from investing in growth stocks, as measured by the decile-rank distributions (DRD) of future revenues, earnings, investment, as well as stock returns, follow a bimodal U-shaped distribution. By contrast, the DRD of value stocks follow a traditional...

This paper examines the cross-sectional relation between leverage and future stock returns. Prior research documents a puzzling negative correlation. We show that it is largely caused by firms' use of internal financing when having significant off-balance-sheet operating assets due to...

Using a unique data set on audits of Chinese companies, this paper examines the Big N audit quality effect by comparing the audit processes of Big N and non-Big N auditors. We document that Big N audits involve significantly more audit hours with higher per-hour fees but do not result in more...

This paper studies the accounting treatment of uncertainty and how it affects a firm's capital structure. We distinguish two sources of uncertainty that raise reliability concerns: inherent uncertainty and incentive uncertainty. By inherent uncertainty, we refer to uncertainty about the quality...