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...

Hedge fund activism removes the diversification discount in targeted conglomerate firms. Targeted conglomerates increase investment in segments with better growth opportunities, while reducing each division's over-reliance on their own cash flow relative to their reliance on cash flows from...

We analyze the market reaction to the announcement of takeover bids initiated by Australian public firms on private and public targets. The results show that acquirers of private targets benefit from a significantly higher share price reevaluation. This so-called listing effect is broad-based...

We analyze the market reaction to the announcement of takeover bids initiated by Australian public firms on private and public targets. The results show that acquirers of private targets benefit from a significantly higher share price reevaluation. This so-called listing effect is broad-based...

Traditional finance theory suggests that riskier investments should yield higher returns. Challenging this notion, anecdotal and empirical evidence suggests that highly-incented managers may take on excessive risk, leading to greater losses, while other theoretical research argues that high...

We examine the impact of mispricing on capital expenditures, R&D, acquisitions, and asset sales. By decomposing the market-to-book ratio into mispricing and growth components, we show that corporate investments are linked to mispricing through market-timing and catering, after controlling for...

In recent years, stock pledge financing has prevailed in China. Individual shareholders’ stock-pledge announcements often release a signal for financing, thus causing abnormal stock-price fluctuations. Our paper focuses on the pledges by individual controlling shareholders between 2006 and...

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...

In this paper we discuss the required return on equity for a simple project with a finite life. To determine a project's cost of equity, it is quite common to use Modigliani and Miller's ‘Proposition II' (1963). However, if the assumptions of MM do not hold, ‘Proposition II' will lead to...

We use earnings forecasts from a cross-sectional model to proxy for cash flow expectations and estimate the implied cost of capital (ICC) for a large sample of firms over 1968-2008. The earnings forecasts generated by the cross-sectional model are superior to analysts' forecasts in terms of...