A firm's risk-taking behavior can have powerful implications for its employees and shareholders, and even surrounding communities. Corporate risk-taking may associate with firms' affiliation with the government and the incentives of their highest-ranking executives, rather than with strategic...

We use the Campbell (1991) return decomposition framework to reexamine the variation in the information content of earnings between profit firms and loss firms and over time. We show that current earnings surprises are more strongly correlated with the discount rate news component of returns for...