We examine the relation between the shareholder base and payout policy. Consistent with the idea that the shareholder base is related to the cost of external financing we find that fi rms with small shareholder bases have lower payout levels and maintain higher cash holdings. We show that...

We examine the nature of information contained in insider trades prior to corporate events. Insiders' net buying increases before open market share repurchase announcements and decreases before seasoned equity offers. Higher insider net buying is associated with better post-event operating...

Does earnings management, even though legal, hinder investor trust in reported earnings? Or do investors regard earnings management as a way for firms to convey private information, or simply as a neutral feature of financial reporting? We find that past abstinence from earnings management...

This paper documents that underpriced firms substitute R&D spending with share buybacks to the detriment of innovation. To identify underpriced firms, I introduce a novel measure of non-fundamental price pressure induced by indirect exposure to industry-level shocks. This measure addresses...

We show that enhanced stock liquidity increases a firm’s propensity to hold cash using tick-size decimalization for identification. Our finding is surprising in light of the view that improved stock liquidity reduces financial constraints. As an explanation, we propose that there is a...

This paper studies the earnings management behavior of a manager in a strategic game in which the manager may have incentives to avoid earnings below the analysts' consensus forecast and the analysts aiming to provide accurate forecasts behave as rational Bayesians. Our analysis reveals the...

Firms with greater financial flexibility should be better able to fund a revenue shortfall resulting from the COVID-19 shock and benefit less from policy responses. We find that firms with high financial flexibility within an industry experience a stock price drop lower by 26% or 9.7 percentage...

How does private information get incorporated into option prices? To study this question, I develop a non-linear, noisy rational expectations equilibrium model with asymmetric information and a full menu of call and put options available for trading. The model allows for an arbitrary...

This paper combines the concept of market sidedness with excess option demand (changes in open interest) to solve the empirical challenge of separating directional from uninformed trading motives in widely available, unsigned options data. Our measure of options market sidedness persistently...

We investigate the impact of high-frequency trading (HFT) on market quality and investor welfare using a general limit order book model. We find that while the presence of HFT always improves market quality under symmetric information, under asymmetric information this is the case only if...