We investigate whether the concentration of power in the hands of individuals characterized as business leaders influences the variability of corporate performance. We do so by proposing an original method to estimate the concentration of power that takes into account both the individual...

This report reviews recent as well as planned changes to accounting and solvency regulations affecting insurers and pension funds and how they may impact long-term investing by these institutions. The review of existing evidence focuses mainly on the impact of risk-based solvency requirements,...

This paper examines the implications of the option value of equity for firms' disclosures. Merton (1974) shows that the equity of levered firms is equivalent to a call option whose value increases in the expected variance of future cash flows. I use this equivalence to calculate firms' vega,...

This paper examines the extent to which financial signaling affects the analysts' and managers' forecast releases. The findings give evidence of heterogeneity of analysts' forecast errors between firms with strong financial indicators (high signal group), weak financial indicators (low signal...

Extant theories suggest that managers may use hedging either to alleviate underinvestment problems caused by costly external financing or to promote overinvestment by circumventing the scrutiny of external capital markets. We empirically investigate this issue using a hand-collected dataset of...

The Republic of Serbia is characterized by an unsatisfactory macroeconomic environment. Under the conditions of an evident shortage of liquid assets, the financial capital has moved from real to the financial sector, which led companies to over-indebtedness and shutdown of their own capacities....

By imposing a market like governance and directing entrepreneurs towards professional management, debt, and especially business debt, can serve as a reliable signal for outside equity investors. Such signals of firm accountability can alleviate the stringent information asymmetry at the early...

EBITDA is a commonly-used performance measure for (1) valuation, (2) debt contracting, and (3) executive compensation. The widespread use of EBITDA by stakeholders may induce managers to focus their attention on EBITDA. Since EBITDA excludes various expenses, managers who fixate on EBITDA may...

In choosing transparency, firms must trade off the benefits from better access to finance against the cost of a greater tax burden. We study this trade-off in a model with distortionary taxes and endogenous rationing of external finance. The evidence from two different data sets, one formed only...

We examine the influence of common ownership on commonalities in the information environment. Specifically, we study commonalities in financial statements and in the actions of key agents such as financial analysts and firm managers who contribute and respond to the information environment....