We consider a setting in which insiders have information about income that outside shareholders do not, but property rights ensure that outside shareholders can enforce a fair payout. To avoid intervention, insiders report income consistent with outsiders' expectations based on publicly...

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...

We study put option sales undertaken by corporations during their repurchase programs. Put sales' main theoretical motivation is market timing, providing an excellent framework for studying whether security issues reflect managers' ability to identify mispricing. Our evidence is that these bets...

This paper proposes a simple homogeneous dynamic model of investment and corporate risk management for a financially constrained firm. Following Froot, Scharfstein, and Stein (1993), we define a corporation's risk management as the coordination of investment and financing decisions. In our...

The average cash to assets ratio for U.S. industrial firms increases by 129% from 1980 to 2004. Because of this increase in the average cash ratio, American firms at the end of the sample period can pay back their debt obligations with their cash holdings, so that the average firm has no...

Miscalibration is a standard measure of overconfidence in both psychology and economics. Although it is often used in lab experiments, there is scarcity of evidence about its effects in practice. We test whether top corporate executives are miscalibrated, and whether their miscalibration impacts...

Using a unique 10-year panel that includes more than 13,300 expected stock market return probability distributions, we find that executives are severely miscalibrated, producing distributions that are too narrow: realized market returns are within the executives' 80% confidence intervals only...

Although firm financial policies were affected by a credit contraction during the recent financial crisis, the impact of increased uncertainty and decreased growth opportunities was stronger than that of the credit contraction per se. From the start of the financial crisis (third quarter of...