This paper investigates the determinants of leveraged buyout (LBO)activity by comparing firms that have implemented LBOs to those that have not. The analysis considers sources of gains from LBOs as well as the costs that can arise from the large amount of debt included in their financial...

This paper empirically examines the extent to which some of the different performance measures developed in the literature provide different evaluations of performance. It also examines how robust these performance scores are to the vhoice of benchmark portfolio. An analysis of 109 passive...

This paper presents a decomposition of short-horizon contrarian profits into various sources based on an analysis os stock price reactions to common factors an firm-specific information. In sharp contrast with the conclusions in the extant literature, we find that the lead-lag structure in stock...

A change in auditors is commonly observed in firms which are selling shares nationally for the first time. One impetusfor this is said to come from underwriters who advise their clients to switch from a local to national auditing firm known for higher quality standards in order to receive a...

This paper examines whether speculative activity has an effect on stock market volatility. With data from 1919 to 1987, we analyze the relation between stock return volatility, estimated from the daily Dow Jones price index, and indicators of speculative activity, including expected share...

We provide a model in which irrational investors trade based upon considerations that are not inherently related to fundamentals. However, because trading activity affects market prices, and because of feedback from security prices to cash flows, the irrational trades influence underlying...

This paper analyzes the effect of financial policy on a firm’s incentives to maintain its reputation for producing a high quality product. The paper demonstrates that in certain situations debt will reduce a firm’s ability to credibly offer high quality products and, as a...

This paper shows that the pattern of short term negative serial covariances for stock returns over different return measurement intervals is consistent with the implications of inventory-based market microstructure models. The results of the tests developed in this paper indicate that the short...