Although the demand for corporate legal services has grown significantly, so has the pressure on companies to reduce legal costs, thereby necessitating a “data-and-metrics” driven approach to legal fees. Accordingly, we exploit the availability of a unique dataset comprising legal fees that...

Policymakers and regulators have been concerned about the impact of audit market concentration resulting from decline in the number of audit firms due to mergers and the demise of Arthur Andersen. In this paper we find a positive association between audit market concentration (Herfindahl index)...

This paper takes a new approach to examine whether investors extrapolate from past returns to form expectations about future stock returns. Unlike prior research that relies on experiments or surveys to derive investors' expectations, we estimate expected returns directly from stock prices, the...

We provide empirical support for the conventional wisdom that there are times when optimistic investors tend to build their hopes into castles in the air, and pay a large premium over intrinsic value for stocks of firms in the early stages of their life cycles with perceived growth...

We provide novel evidence supporting the view that stock prices of some firms in the early growth stage of their life cycle are set by optimistic investors fixated on sales growth. We identify these firms as those that went public during an industry IPO waves, had high sales growths but low...

This study investigates the impact of foreign investors on the informational efficiency of stock prices in local markets. Using a large sample of Japanese firms over the period 1975 to 2008, we find that prices deviate less from a random walk for stocks with a large change in foreign ownership....

A stock divestment campaign is a common strategy used by social activists to pressure corporations to abandon undesirable practices. However, evidence on the effectiveness of the strategy remains mixed. In this paper we examine the effectiveness of an international stock boycott by studying a...

A stock divestment campaign is a common strategy used by social activists to pressure corporations to abandon undesirable practices. However, evidence on the effectiveness of the strategy remains mixed. In this paper, we examine the effectiveness of an international stock boycott by studying a...