This paper studies the first day return of 227 carve-outs during 1996-2013. I find that the first day return of newly issued subsidiary stocks is explained by the reporting distortions in the pre IPO period, conditioned on whether the executives and directors of the subsidiary received stock...

We study the effect of financial market frictions on managerial compensation. We embed a market microstructure model into an otherwise standard contracting framework, and analyze optimal pay-for-performance when managers use information they learn from the market in their investment decisions....

Traditional stock option grant is the most common form of incentive pay in executive compensation. Applying a principal-agent analysis, we find this common practice suboptimal and firms are better off linking incentive pay to average stock prices. Holding the cost of the option grant to the firm...

II address the way agency incentives evolve, from listed equity with low liquidity to highly liquid stocks with active informed speculators. I conclude that, as the informativeness of stock price about the manager's actions improves, less weight needs to be given to both equity and non-price...

We derive equilibrium asset prices when fund managers deviate from benchmark indices to exploit noise-trader induced distortions but fund investors constrain these deviations. Because constraints force managers to buy assets that they underweight when these assets appreciate, overvalued assets...

This paper explores a puzzling historical trend in US-listed firms: Between 1950 and 2018, firm-specific stock price crashes rose from 5.5% to an astonishing 27%. Most of the literature attributes such crashes to agency reasons, i.e., executives camouflaging bad news via financial reporting...

We examine the implication of executive gender on asset prices. Using a large sample of US public firms during 2006--2015, we find a negative association between female CFOs and future stock price crash risk. However, the impact of female CEOs on crash risk is not statistically significant. The...

We find that powerful chief executive officers (CEOs) are associated with higher crash risk. The positive association between CEO power and crash risk holds when controlling for earnings management, tax avoidance, chief executive officer's option incentives, and CEO overconfidence. Firms with...

Using a large sample of U.S. public firms, we find robust evidence that short interest is positively related to one-year ahead stock price crash risk. The evidence is consistent with the view that short sellers are able to detect bad news hoarding by managers. Additional findings show that the...