The paper reviews the evidence on the macroeconomic announcement premium and its implications on equilibrium asset pricing models. Empirically, a large fraction of the equity market risk premium is realized on a small number of trading days with significant macroeconomic announcements. We review...

We find that on average an announcement of rising unemployment is 'good news' for stocks during economic expansions and 'bad news' during economic contractions. Thus stock prices usually increase on news of rising unemployment, since the economy is usually in an expansion phase. We provide an...

This paper examines the impact of capital gains taxes on equity pricing. Examining three-day cumulative abnormal returns for quarterly earning announcements from 1983-1997, we present evidence consistent with shareholders' capital gains taxes affecting stock price responses. To our knowledge,...

This paper defines an intertemporal tax discontinuity (ITD) as a circumstance in which different tax rates are applied to gains and losses realized at one point in time versus some other point in time, and studies the effects of ITDs on market behaviors at the time of disclosures of firm...

We study the reaction of stock prices to announcements of reductions in force (RIFs) using a sample of nearly 3878 such announcements in 1176 large firms during the 1970-97 period collected from the Wall Street Journal Index. We note that, although there has been a dramatic secular increase in...

This paper investigates the long-term performance of Japanese firms issuing convertible debt or equity. We find that these firms perform poorly even though the stock-price reaction to convertible debt and equity issue announcements is not significantly negative for Japanese firms and Japanese...

This paper characterizes the volatility in the DM-dollar foreign exchange market using an annual sample of five-minute returns. Our modeling approach explicitly captures the pronounced intraday activity patterns, the strong macroeconomic announcement effects, and the volatility persistence, or...

We provide a model of closed-end fund pricing which includes investors who do not form expectations correctly and allows for salient country-specific news to affect this expectation formation process. We use panel data on prices and net asset values of closed- end country funds to examine...

We examine the reaction of daily bond prices to the release of government macroeconomic news. These news releases are of interest because they are released on periodic, preannounced dates and because they cause substantial bond market volatility. The news component of volatility is not...

We propose and implement a new test of the dividend signaling hypothesis that is designed to discriminate between dividend signaling and other theories that would account for the apparent existence of a dividend preference. Our test refines the use of data on stock price responses to dividend...