This paper investigates the effectiveness of using securities class action lawsuits in monitoring defendant firms by institutional lead plaintiffs from two aspects: (1) immediate litigation outcomes, including the probability of surviving the motion to dismiss and the settlement amount, and (2)...

In this paper, we discuss the construction of the confidence intervals for the regression vector [beta] in a linear model under negatively associated errors. It is shown that the blockwise empirical likelihood (EL) ratio statistic for [beta] is asymptotically [chi]2-type distributed. The result...

This paper develops a model to analyze the impact of shareholder litigation on managers' voluntary disclosure strategies in equity offerings. The major findings are as follows. First, under different economic parameters, the entrepreneur has two possible equilibrium disclosure strategies: full...

Using a large sample of U.S. firms for the period 1993-2009, we provide evidence that the sensitivity of a chief financial officer's (CFO) option portfolio value to stock price is significantly and positively related to the firm's future stock price crash risk. In contrast, we find only weak...

Using a large sample of U.S. firms for the period 1995-2008, we provide strong and robust evidence that corporate tax avoidance is positively associated with firm-specific stock price crash risk. This finding is consistent with the following view: Tax avoidance facilitates managerial rent...

In many polyandrous species, the last male to mate sires most of the offspring. This phenomenon has been explained as the result of male manipulation, postcopulatory female choice, or both. However, in most previous studies, direct evidence for these explanations is lacking. Here, we report our...

Compared to mutual funds, hedge funds prefer smaller, opaque value securities, and have higher turnover and more active share bets. Decomposing returns into three components, we find that hedge funds are better than mutual funds at stock picking by only 1.32% per year on a value-weighted basis,...