We find that bidders are more likely to hold conference calls at merger announcements when the mergers are financed with stock and when the transactions are large. After controlling for endogeneity, we also find that conference calls are associated with more favorable market reactions to merger...

We posit that accounting conservatism could mitigate the value destruction associated with increases in cash holdings. Consistent with this conjecture, we find that the market value of an additional dollar in cash holdings increases in accounting conservatism. This result is robust to...

A firm's long-term stock returns are negatively related to past growth in housing prices in the state where the firm is located. The housing price effect is persistent, and robust to controlling for the long-term stock return reversal effect, changes in mortgage interest rates across the states,...

Extant studies often assume that targets' private ownership mitigates acquirers' incentives and opportunities to finance acquisitions with inflated stocks. This view stems from the observation that, although the average stock-for-stock acquirer's merger announcement abnormal return is negative...

Prior studies suggest that investors have limited attention. Tests of the inattention hypothesis have been performed in the context of relatively small corporate events, particularly earnings announcements. Presumably, large corporate events would always attract sufficient investor attention....

We analyze whether analysts sacrifice forecast accuracy for informativeness by examining: (1) the association between analysts' deviations from management guidance and earnings management; (2) the effect of the deviations on analyst forecast accuracy; and (3) the effect of the deviations on...

Subprime loans were disproportionately offered in minority areas prior to the subprime crisis, even after controlling for other determinants of loan costs. There are two potential explanations for this phenomenon. Lenders could have charged subprime rates in minority areas to compensate for...

Dividend payments are generally costly to shareholders. One principal reason for such payments is that they force managers to raise funds in the external capital markets to finance new projects, which presumably reduces their incentives to engage in empire-building activities. We posit that,...

There is a significant positive market reaction to merger announcements by acquiring firms that use lower quality external auditors. One explanation for the positive performance of these firms is that their cost-of-capital is reduced as a result of their voluntary submission to the intense...

There are at least two plausible explanations for the post-merger underperformance: information asymmetry and performance extrapolation. The first hypothesis maintains that acquirers are over-valued before the mergers, while the second one maintains that acquirers become over-valued as a result...