While increases in earnings are common, we identify a setting in which they signal a separating equilibrium. Firms that “defy gravity' (DG) by reporting increases in earnings despite experiencing a decline in sales from continuing operations, signal their viability as a going- concern, and...

The extant literature provides evidence that, for many SEC 8-K filings, there is a significant market reaction on the date of the event that led to the 8-K filing, on the days between the event date and the filing date and on the filing date. We address the question, who pays attention and who...

Although formal guidance instructs firms to avoid issuing lengthy and boilerplate risk factor disclosures, regulators and users of financial statements note these disclosures continue to be excessively long and boilerplate. The persistence of these characteristics is particularly surprising...

We use data on individual investors' stock holdings and retail trades to investigate whether corporate tax avoidance affects the willingness of individual investors to own stock. Consistent with corporate tax avoidance increasing the perceived risk of owning stock and the costs of processing...

In many research settings, entropy balancing (Hainmueller 2012) is a convenient statistical method for reweighting a control sample to achieve covariate balance with a treatment sample of interest. Despite this, researchers raise several concerns and questions not specifically addressed by...

The extant literature provides evidence that, for many SEC 8-K filings, there is a significant market reaction on the date of the event that led to the 8-K filing, on the days between the event date and the filing date and on the filing date. We address the question, who pays attention and who...