This paper provides evidence that the market does not efficiently incorporate expected returns implied by analyst price targets into prices. I use a novel decomposition to extract information and bias components from these analyst-expected returns and develop an asset pricing framework that...

We provide a psychological explanation for the delayed price response to news about economically linked firms. We show that the return predictability of economically linked firms depends on the nearness to the 52-week high stock price. The interaction between news about economically linked firms...

Why are stock prices much more volatile than the underlying dividends? The excess volatility of prices can in principle be attributed to two different causes: time-varying discount rates for expected future dividends, arising from variation in risk premia; or the irrational exuberance of...

Analyzing public and private US commercial banks, we document a discontinuity around the 10% regulatory capital ratio. This threshold separates well capitalized from adequately capitalized banks, granting benefits to banks that fall into the former category. We find that the significance and...

In the wake of the financial crisis, policymakers expressed the concern that banks’ use of the incurred loss model exacerbates their lending procyclicality by delaying the recognition of loan losses to recessions. Responding to this concern, the FASB issued Accounting Standards Update 2016-13,...

Using aggregate data from national accounts, we study whether strengthening and harmonizing securities regulation across the European Union increases household equity ownership. We find a significant increase in the proportion of liquid assets invested in equity, both when a household's own...

This paper examines both the materiality of intangibles and the related disclosure quality under IFRS in the notes of firms on the German benchmark stock index DAX during the four-year period 2008-2011. As proxies, we use the relation of intangibles-to-equity (materiality) and a disclosure index...

I develop a structural model to quantify the costs of tax avoidance. In the model, the firm trades off tax savings with tax-audit risk, financial-reporting benefits, and non-tax costs (which affect pre-tax income). The comparative statics suggest tax avoidance is path-dependent, which can help...

Over the past 12 years, financial analysts across the world have been optimistically wrong with their 12-month earnings forecasts by 25.3%. This study may be the first of its kind to assess analyst earnings forecast accuracy at all listed companies across the globe, covering 70 countries. A...

This study focuses on the impact of model estimation methods on earnings forecast accuracy. Compared with an ordinary least squares (OLS) regression combined with winsorization, robust regression MM-estimation improves the earnings forecast accuracy of all the models examined, especially for...