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...

Using the complete history of regular quarterly and annual filings by U.S. corporations from 1995-2014, we show that when firms make an active change in their reporting practices, this conveys an important signal about future firm operations. Changes to the language and construction of financial...

We survey 401 financial executives, and conduct in-depth interviews with an additional 20, to determine the key factors that drive decisions related to reported earnings and voluntary disclosure. The majority of firms view earnings, especially EPS, as the key metric for outsiders, even more so...

Insiders can artificially deflect the market prices of financial instruments from their full-information or inside value' by issuing deceptive accounting reports. Incentive support for disinformational activity comes through forms of compensation that allow corporate insiders to profit...

Using a unique nationally representative sample of U.S. establishments surveyed in 1993 and 1996, we examine the relationship between workplace innovations and establishment productivity and wages. We match plant level practices with plant level productivity and wage outcomes and estimate...

The rise of information technology and big data analytics has given rise to "the new economy." But are its economics new? This article constructs a growth model where firms accumulate data, instead of capital. We incorporate three key features of data: 1) Data is a by-product of economic...

We examine the effect of patenting on the survival prospects of 356 internet-related firms that IPO'd at the height of the stock market bubble of the late 1990s. By March 2005, nearly 2/3 of these firms had delisted from the NASDAQ exchange. Although changes in the legal environment in the US in...

A surprisingly large amount of commentary today marks the beginning of the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s from either the Netscape Communications initial public offering of 1995 or Alan Greenspan's "irrational exuberance" speech of 1996. We believe that this is wrong: we see little sign that...

We model the relationship between asset float (tradeable shares) and speculative bubbles. Investors trade a stock with limited float because of insider lock-ups. They have heterogeneous beliefs due to overconfidence and face short-sales constraints. A bubble arises as price overweighs optimists'...

Not necessarily. The fundamental value of a firm increases with uncertainty about average future profitability, and this uncertainty was unusually high in the late 1990s. We calibrate a stock valuation model that includes this uncertainty, and show that the uncertainty needed to match the...