If global warming is to stay below 2°C, there are four risks of assets stranding. First, substantial fossil fuel reserves will be stranded at the end of the fossil era. Second, this will be true for exploration capital too. Third, unanticipated changes in present or expected future climate...

I document a beneficial effect of the government's participation in product markets. Exploiting the 2008-09 financial crisis as a natural experiment, I show that federal procurement contracts insulate government contractors' performance from the crisis. By 2009, government contractors had 19%...

This study finds that stock return volatility is higher during periods of high tax policy uncertainty (TPU), even after controlling for other sources of general macroeconomic uncertainty. Further, we find that the relation between TPU and stock return volatility is more pronounced where firms...

Prior research provides mixed evidence on whether corporate lobbying activities increase or decrease shareholder value. In this study we use detailed data on corporate lobbying expenditures to investigate which factors influence the returns to corporate lobbying activities. Specifically, we...

The rise and subsequent collapse of US house prices was one of the factors underlying the recent financial crisis. One could expect that the crisis brought increased attention to the housing market and thus led to stronger market reactions to house price news. We find that reactions indeed...

We study the impact of accelerated vesting of equity awards on takeovers, whereby the restricted stock and/or stock options of the target CEO immediately vest and become unrestricted upon the close of the acquisition. We find that takeover premiums are significantly larger when the target CEO...

Given the estimated scale of tax planning activities by firms and the associated benefits and costs an interesting question is the nature of the relationship between tax planning and firms' market value. Although traditionally corporate tax planning has been viewed as benefiting shareholders via...

In inefficient stock markets payout policy may be directly relevant for stock prices, not only by way of announcement effects considered in signaling games. We show that paying out free cash flow, either as a dividend or via repurchasing shares, has in general a positive price impact and...

Using data from bank holding company regulatory reports, we examine the relationshipbetween stock repurchases and financial performance for a large sample of bank holding companies over the years 1987 to 1998. The primary result is that higher levels of repurchases in one year are associated...

This paper reconsiders the issue of share price reactions to dividend announcements. Previous papers rely almost exclusively on a naive dividend model in which the dividend change is used as a proxy for the dividend surprise. We use the difference between the actual dividend and the analyst...