Managers conducting earnings conference calls display distinctive styles in their word choice. Some CEOs and CFOs are straight talkers. Others, by contrast, are vague talkers. Vague talkers routinely use qualifying words indicating uncertainty, such as "approximately", "probably", or "maybe"....

This paper employs a novel multi-country dataset of corporate defaults to develop a model of distress risk specific to emerging markets. The data suggest that global financial variables such as US interest rates and shifts in global liquidity and risk aversion have significant predictive power...

Measuring the private returns to R&D requires knowledge of its private depreciation or obsolescence rate, which is inherently variable and responds to competitive pressure. Nevertheless, most of the previous literature has used a constant depreciation rate to construct R&D capital stocks and...

Following a brief review of the U.S. domestic airline industry under regulation (1938-1978), we study the changes that have occurred in pricing, service, and competition in the 28 years since deregulation. We then examine some of the major public policy issues facing the industry: (a) the...

The extent of and changes in inter-generational mobility of wealth are central to understanding dynamics of wealth inequality but hard to measure. Using estate tax returns data, we observe that the share of women among the very wealthy (top 0.01%) in the United States peaked in the late 1960s,...

What is good for big business need not generally advance a country's overall economy. Big business turnover correlates with rising income, productivity, and (in high income countries) faster capital accumulation; consistent with Schumpeter's (1912) creative destruction and recent formalizations...

This paper explores the determinants of corporate failure and the pricing of financially distressed stocks using US data over the period 1963 to 2003. Firms with higher leverage, lower profitability, lower market capitalization, lower past stock returns, more volatile past stock returns, lower...

A vast labor literature has found evidence of a "glass ceiling", whereby women are under-represented among senior management. A key question remains the extent to which this reflects unobserved differences in productivity, preferences, prejudice, or systematically biased beliefs about the...

Organizational theorists have long acknowledged the importance of the formal and informal incentives facing a firm's employees, stressing that the political economy of a firm plays a major role in shaping organizational life and firm behavior. Yet the detailed study of incentive systems has...

Until its sales of a product materialize, a firm is a "pre-producer" in the market for that product. That firm may may be a new start-up, or it may already sell other products. Firms that do not succeed in generating sales eventually become discouraged and move on to other activities. When this...