This paper examines the relationship between investor protection and corporate insiders' incentive to take value-enhancing risks. In a poor investor protection environment corporations are often run by entrenched insiders who appropriate considerable corporate resources as personal benefits....

The neoclassical q-theory is a good start to understand the cross section of returns. Under constant return to scale, stock returns equal levered investment returns that are tied directly with characteristics. This equation generates the relations of average returns with book-to-market,...

We test for firm-level asset investment effects in returns by examining the cross-sectional relation between firm asset growth and subsequent stock returns. As a test variable, we use the year-on-year percentage change in total assets. Asset growth rates are strong predictors of future abnormal...

We establish an empirical link between the ex-ante uncertainty about macroeconomic fundamentals and the ex-post resolution of this uncertainty in financial markets. We measure macroeconomic uncertainty using prices of economic derivatives and relate this measure to changes in implied...

We investigate the information content of the call (put) Early Exercise Premium, or EEP, defined as the normalized difference in prices between otherwise comparable American and European call (put) options. The call EEP specifically captures investors' expectations about future lump sum dividend...

In countries with a weak legal system and a high level of corruption it has been shown that political connections are valuable to a corporation. This paper explores whether political connections are also important in the U.S., which has well-developed financial markets as well as a strong legal...

We reexamine long-term abnormal returns for portfolios sorted on governance characteristics. Firms with strong shareholder rights and firms with weak shareholder rights differ from the general population of firms and from each other in how they cluster across industries. Using tests that are...

Overinvestment in certain firms or sectors induced by corporate fraud, where informed insiders strategically manipulate outside investors' beliefs by exaggerating financial performance and economic prospects, has been endemic historically and has recently attracted much attention. We present a...

We identify a specific channel (debt covenants) and the corresponding mechanism (transfer of control rights) through which financing frictions impact corporate investment. Using a regression discontinuity design, we show that capital investment declines sharply following a financial covenant...

We present an empirical study of the pricing effect of liquidity in the credit default swaps (CDS) market. We construct liquidity proxies to capture various facets of CDS liquidity including adverse selection, search frictions, and inventory costs. We show that the liquidity effect on CDS...