This issue of the Journal of Financial Economics contains the first set of studies in the new Clinical Papers section. The objective of this section is to provide a high-quality professional outlet for scholarly studies of specific cases, events, practices, and specialized applications. By...

This paper reviews much of the scientific literature on the market for corporate control. The evidence indicates that corporate takeovers generate positive gains, that target firm shareholders benefit, and that bidding firm shareholders do not lose. The gains created by corporate takeovers do...

This paper analyzes investment rules for various organizational forms that are distinguished by the characteristics of their residual claims. Different restrictions on residual claims lead to different decision rules. The analysis indicates that the investment decisions of open corporations,...

There is an impressive body of empirical evidence which indicates that successive price changes in individual common stocks are very nearly independent. Recent papers by Mandelbrot and Samuelson show rigorously that independence of successive price changes is consistent with an efficient market,...

This paper analyzes the survival of organizations in which decision agents do not bear a major share of the wealth effects of their decisions. This is what the literature on large corporations calls separation of ownership and control. Such separation of decision and risk bearing functions is...

Social and economic activities, like religion, entertainment, education, research, and the production of other goods and services, are carried on by different types of organizations, for example, corporations, proprietorships, partnerships, mutuals and nonprofits. There is competition among...

We study the stock market reaction to aggregate earnings news. Previous research shows that, for individual firms, stock prices react positively to earnings news but require several quarters to fully reflect the information in earnings. We find that the relation between returns and earnings is...

This paper uses monthly returns from 1802-2010, daily returns from 1885-2010, and intraday returns from 1982-2010 in the United States to show how stock volatility has changed over time. It also uses various measures of volatility implied by option prices to infer what the market was expecting...

Anomalies are empirical results that seem to be inconsistent with maintained theories of asset-pricing behavior. They indicate either market inefficiency (profit opportunities) or inadequacies in the underlying asset-pricing model. The evidence in this paper shows that the size effect, the value...