We show that political geography has a pervasive effect on the cross-section of stock returns. We collect election results over a 40-year period and use a political alignment index (PAI) of each state's leading politicians with the ruling (presidential) party to proxy for local firms’...

The well-established negative correlation between staggered boards (SBs) and firm value could be due to SBs leading to lower value or a reflection of low-value firms' greater propensity to maintain SBs. We analyze the causal question using a natural experiment involving two Delaware court...

We provide evidence that some profitable insider stock selling is motivated by public information. At firms that disclose having concentrated sales relationships, insiders appear to sell their own stock profitably based on public information about their principal customers. Supplier insiders...

In this study we show that market uncertainty [measured by the Chicago Board Options Exchange Market Volatility Index (VIX)] exerts a large market-wide impact on liquidity, which gives rise to co-movements in individual asset liquidity. The effect of VIX on stock liquidity is greater than the...

Motivated by the pioneering study of Morck, Yeung, and Yu (2000), this paper investigates whether and how news commonality varies according to a country׳s institutional environments. Using a unique global news data set across 41 countries for the 2000–2009 period, we document three notable...

This paper examines the impact of central clearing on the credit default swap (CDS) market using a sample of voluntarily cleared single-name contracts. Consistent with central clearing reducing counterparty risk, CDS spreads increase around the commencement of central clearing and are lower than...

Form S-1 is the first SEC filing in the initial public offering (IPO) process. The tone of the S-1, in terms of its definitiveness in characterizing the firm’s business strategy and operations, should affect investors’ ability to value the IPO. We find that IPOs with high levels of uncertain...

The effectiveness of any sanction depends on the costs of avoiding its restrictions. We examine whether bearish option strategies were substitutes for short sales during the September 2008 short-sale ban. We find a significant diminution in option volumes and a significant increase in option...

We investigate the aggregate market quality impact of equity shares that fail to deliver (hereafter “FTDs”). For a sample of 1,492 NYSE stocks over a 42-month period from 2005 to 2008, greater FTDs lead to higher liquidity and pricing efficiency, and their impact is similar to our estimate...

We demonstrate that legislation has a simple, yet previously undetected, impact on stock prices. Exploiting the voting record of legislators whose constituents are the affected industries, we show that the votes of these “interested” legislators capture important information seemingly...