Most firms face some form of competition in product markets. The degree of competition a firm faces feeds back into its cash flows and affects the values of the securities it issues. Through its effects on stock prices, product market competition affects the prices of options on equity and...

We investigate whether ownership concentration influences bank profitability in a developing country context. We focus on bank ownership concentration measured as the amount of direct equity held by a majority shareholder categorised into: high ownership concentration, moderate ownership...

Asset pricing in its essence is a very controversial topic. Despite numerous research papers criticising traditional approaches, such as linear factor models, practitioners as well as academics repeatedly return to the milestone models such as the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM), mainly due...

I show that an asset pricing model for the equity claims of a value-maximizing firm can be constructed from its optimal financial contracting behavior. I study a dynamic contracting model in which firms trade off the costs and benefits of a given promise to pay external lenders in a specific...

This paper examines the effect of accounting conservatism on firm-level investment during the 2007-2008 global financial crisis. Using a differences-in-differences design, we find that firms with less conservative financial reporting experienced a sharper decline in investment activity following...

In this paper, I extend the results of Moskowitz and Vissing-Jørgensen (2002) on the returns to entrepreneurial investments in the United States. First, following the authors' methodology I replicate the original findings from the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) for the period 1989 - 1998 and...

Over the last two decades, a number of financial disasters have occurred due to failure in risk management procedures. If some, as the Asian financial crisis, had a very much more muted global impact (even though they sent shock waves through global financial markets, the main damage were fairly...

In this paper, I examine how labor shortage affects hiring-return relationship. I construct firm-year level measure of labor shortage using textual analysis of firms' SEC fillings. I show that the negative relationship between firm's hiring rate and its future return is only significant for...

We outline analytically that when testing different implied cost of capital (ICC) measures for validation by employing the Vuolteenaho (2002) framework, the cash-flow news in the validation framework should be defined in a way that considers the model specific assumed sequence of future cash...

Bond carry trading is a popular strategy among investors who are looking for higher returns while minimizing risks. The basic premise of this strategy is to buy a high yield bond and sell a low yield bond in the same currency and sector, with the intention of capturing the difference in yield,...