Modigliani and Miller (M&M) proposed that investors forgo dividends, leaving the money available for reinvestment as retained earnings. This recommendation takes two parts: Proposition III, i.e., a dividend has no impact on market value, and Proposition IV, i.e., that financial policy is of no...

This study develops and evaluates a model that generates synthetic credit ratings using accounting and market based information. The model performs very well in explaining agency ratings, suggesting that fitted values for unrated companies are likely to be reasonably precise. In addition, the...

This paper provides an innovative theoretical model and empirical evidence for how the illiquidity of corporate bonds, as trading noise, dampens firm-specific information incorporated into bond prices. We find a negative relation between bond illiquidity and synchronicity, and this empirical...

We examine the performance of 2,790 private equity (PE) funds incepted during 1979-2008 using Stochastic Discount Factors (SDFs) implied by the two leading consumption-based asset pricing models (CBAPMs) — external habit and long-run risks — as their assumptions appear consistent with...

We develop a way of ranking and scoring actively managed funds and investment strategies. Our performance measure accounts for the feature that investors may exhibit caution, via the mechanism of ambiguity aversion, when evaluating investment strategies. Linking developed theory to data, we...

Using word content analysis on the time-series of IPO prospectuses, we find evidence that issuers trade off underpricing and strategic disclosure as potential hedges against litigation risk. This tradeoff explains a significant fraction of the variation in prospectus revision patterns, IPO...

The firm geographic location matters in IPOs because investors have a strong preference for newly issued local stocks and provide abnormal demand in local offerings. Using equity holdings data for more than 53,000 households, we show the probability to participate to the stock market and the...

Based on prospect theory, we posit that security analysts' target prices function as a reference point for takeover bids and affect deal completion. Using a sample of US takeovers from 1999 to 2014, we find a negative relation between target prices for a takeover target and the chances for...

Given the frequency and its important value implication of post-IPO M&A activity, we investigate empirically whether investors can utilize information based on IPO deal structure to predict merger and acquisition activity among newly public firms. Consistent with the hypothesis that some firms...

Past studies document that incentive conflicts may lead issuer-paid credit rating agencies to provide optimistically-biased ratings. In this paper, we present evidence that investors question the quality of issuer-paid ratings and raise corporate bond yields where the issuer-paid rating is more...