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...

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 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'...

The U.S. went through a remarkable structural transformation between 1800 and 2000. In 1800 the majority of people worked in agriculture. Barely anyone did by 2000. What caused the rapid demise of agriculture in the economy? The analysis here concentrates on the development of new consumer goods...

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...

We propose a framework for understanding recurrent historical episodes of vigorous economic expansion accompanied by extreme asset valuations, as exhibited by the U.S. in the 1990s. We interpret this phenomenon as a high-valuation equilibrium with a low effective cost of capital based on...

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...

The extension of information and communication technologies to economic activity is changing the labour market in important ways. This article shows that computerization and use of the Internet are associated with greater hours worked as well as higher wages; that IT occupations are rapidly...