Using federal judge ideology as an exogenous measure of firms’ ex ante litigation risk, we document that the initial public offerings (IPOs) of the firms headquartered in more liberal circuits are more underpriced. The effect is mitigated when plaintiffs’ pleading standards are more...

Stocks with high idiosyncratic volatility perform poorly relative to low idiosyncratic volatility stocks. We offer a novel explanation of this anomaly based on real options, which is consistent with earlier findings on idiosyncratic volatility (the positive contemporaneous relation between...

We use an empirical model to categorize firms into portfolios based on operational risk. Using these portfolios, we show that a strategy of buying firms in the highest decile of operational risk and shorting firms in the lowest decile of operational risk earned a positive but insignificant...

If two investments have the same payoff covariance with the market but one has higher expected payoff, which asset according to the CAPM has most risk? One answer is that as far as risk goes the two assets are the same, because they have the same covariance with the market. The correct answer,...

We show theoretically that when Bayesian investors face time-series uncertainty about assets' risk exposures, differences in their priors affect the pricing of risk in the cross-section: different priors for the same asset can generate differences in perceived risk exposures, and thereby...

We investigate the relationship between bankruptcy risk and expected future sales growth for Norwegian non-listed firms for the period 1988-2007. We find that firms with high bankruptcy risk also have high expected future growth. Financial ratios characterizing firms with high bankruptcy risk...

Unlike traditional bonds, Floating-rate bonds (FRB) do not have a fixed rate coupon. Instead, their rate fluctuates or floats based on the market plus a spread. As a result, FRBs tend to be less vulnerable to interest-rate fluctuations. Many believe FRBs can help preserve principal, while...

IPO firms with high-powered CEO incentive contracts have lower failure rates in the aftermarket. Economically, an interquartile change in the distribution of CEO pay translates in a reduction of the failure risk probability by approximately 21%. The Pay Gap between the CEO and its subordinate...

This paper offers a novel framework, combining firm operational risk, IPO pricing risk, and market risk, to model IPO failure risk. By analyzing nearly a thousand variables, we observe that prior IPO failure risk models have suffered from a major missing-variable problem. Evidence reveals...