We examine whether initial returns influence investors' decisions to return to the stock market following withdrawal. Using a survival analysis technique to estimate Finnish retail investors' likelihood of stock market re-entry reveals that investors who experience lower initial returns are less...

Despite momentum's strong historical performance, its returns have large negative skewness and occasionally experiences persistent strings of sharp negative returns, referred as "momentum crashes" in the recent literature. I argue that momentum crashes are due to crowded trades which push prices...

We find that investor sentiment should affect a firm's employment policy in a world with moral hazard and noise traders. Consistent with the model's predictions, we show that higher sentiment among US investors leads to: (1) higher employment growth worldwide; (2) lower labor productivity, as the...

We develop a multi-country model with moral hazard and noise traders, and show that investor sentiment should affect employment growth both domestically and abroad. Using a large sample of international industry-level data, we find strong support for the model's predictions. We show that US...

Initial Gross Domestic Product (GDP) announcements are important economic signals that convey information on the state of the economy but contain substantial estimation error. We investigate how GDP estimation errors affect firms' real decisions and profitability. Consistent with theoretical...

The use of credit ratings has been advocated by regulators in the US as well as in Europe. The creation of “Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organizations” statue strengthened the appearance of the triopoly of Moody's, Standard & Poor's and Fitch thus creating a de jure dominant...

To gain understanding on the role of institutional factors on households' demand for risky financial assets, this paper examines empirically the impact of the level of personal bankruptcy provisions in the US. Chapter 7 allows protecting the home equity in bankruptcy up to a certain limit or...

The study of firms' default has attracted wide interest among both practitioners and scholars. However, attention has often been limited to a relatively small set of financial variables. In this work, we try to increase the scope of analysis extending the investigation to other possible...

We estimate the costs of financial distress prior to default (pre-default costs) separately from the loss incurred at default (the loss given default) using a dynamic trade-off model of capital structure. We document that pre-default costs are on average equal to 6.5% of firm value per year. We...