I document a recent increase in the usefulness of quarterly earnings announcements. I measure the usefulness of earnings announcements as the percentage of total annual excess returns that occurs on or around quarterly earnings announcements. In the main sample, approximately 18.4% of...

To curb opportunism in financial reporting, scholars and regulators have proposed that firms be required to report reconciliations of prior year estimates. We provide experimental evidence that such disclosures are not sufficient for non-professional investors to identify those firms that are...

This paper examines the effect of corporate governance and stock liquidity on corporate payout policy in the context of the split-share structure reform initiated in 2005 in China. In this reform, non-tradable shares were converted into tradable shares compulsorily. The reform removed a...

I analyze attention-induced stock repurchases. I hypothesize that firms that announce an open market repurchase program of a certain size are likely to follow through to a larger extent if they receive greater investor attention to their repurchase behavior. I test this hypothesis using 10-K and...

“Modern” accounting adheres to 15th century conventions in maintaining that corporate stock repurchases never result in a profit or loss for a firm. In actual practice, however, few purely financial decisions rival stock repurchases in their bearing on the well-being of shareholders. Because...

This paper finds that CEO stock options influence the choice, amount, and timing of funds distributed as a buyback. These results favor a managerial opportunism motive for buybacks over other theories and support two key research expectations - that buybacks impose option-induced agency costs on...

The recent economic downturn resulted in firms generating significant tax losses, which they risked losing if they experienced an ownership change. In response, a number of loss firms adopted poison pill plans. We document a significant negative market reaction to the announcement of 62 poison...

China's stock market has gone through major structural changes since its inception in early 1990s. In this survey article, we review the empirical literature that document these important structural changes and published in 15 leading accounting and finance journals from 1998 to 2013. In...

We examine the relation between short-sale constraints and stock price crash risk. To establish causality, we take advantage of a regulatory change from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)'s Regulation SHO pilot program, which temporarily lifted short-sale constraints for randomly...

Exploring staggered quasi-exogenous regulatory changes in China, we find that banking sector FDI significantly reduces the likelihood of stock price crashes of domestic listed firms. The effect is more pronounced among firms with ex-ante lower disclosure quality and worse performances, which...