Because dividends reduce the funds available for investment, many market observers and investors associate high dividend payout with weak future earnings growth. Tests using aggregate market data, however, provided evidence that contradicts that view. Because aggregate results may not apply at...

The separate associations between financial leverage and valuation and between diversification and valuation have been widely researched. The joint function of leverage, diversification, and valuation, however, has received much less attention. Previous research shows that compared to...

We model and estimate analysts' herding propensity with I/B/E/S annual earnings forecast data. Compared to prior studies, our paper has three unique features. First, we estimate analysts' true posterior beliefs of a firm's earnings assuming rational expectations rather than using analysts' own...

We build a simple model of analysts' propensity to herd. Using ideas from GMM and simulated method of moments, we estimate an analyst's herding propensity with I/B/E/S forecast data from 1989-2004. We find that, of the analysts whose herding propensity is defined by our model, 85% of them tend...

We study a preemptive scheduling problem on two identical parallel machines that share a common server. Each job has to be loaded by the server before being processed on one of the machines and unloaded by the server after its processing. The loading and unloading times are both equal to one...