While major stock market indices are followed by large monetary investments, we document that membership decisions for the S&P 500 index have a nontrivial amount of discretion. We show that firms' purchases of S&P ratings appear to improve their chance of entering the index (but purchases of...

This paper derives analytical measures of the combined effects of tax changes and adjustment costs on investment and market value. Unlike earlier measures, the effective tax rate derived is valid in the presence of adjustment costs and anticipated tax changes. The derived measure of the impact...

The key purpose of corporate finance is to provide methods to compute the value of projects. The baseline textbook recommendation is to use the Present Value (PV) formula of expected cash flows, with a discount rate based on the CAPM. In this paper, we ask what is, empirically, the best...