I use an accounting reform to assess the agency cost of debt in diversified firms. Firms that switch from single-to-multisegment following the reform suffer a 12% increase in the bond spread than their standalone peers. Consistent with lenders anticipating underinvestment and asset substitution...

This study derives and evaluates estimates of the equity risk premium inferred from the stock prices and analysts' earnings forecasts of U.S. insurance companies. During most of the sample period, April 1983 through September 2012, the quarterly median implied equity risk premium (IERP) of U.S....

Managers conducting earnings conference calls display distinctive styles in their word choice. Some CEOs and CFOs routinely use qualifying words such as "approximately", "probably", and "maybe". They are vague talkers. Straight talkers, by contrast, use such words less frequently. Analysts and...

We develop a structural bond pricing approach and implement it on a large panel of US industrial bonds using an efficient maximum likelihood methodology. We evaluate the model's ability to predict yield spread levels and changes out-of-sample. Errors are smaller and distinctly less variable than...

This paper adopts a novel approach to studying the evolution of interest rate term structure over the U.S. business cycles and to predicting recessions. Applying an effective algorithm, I classify the Treasury yield curve into distinct shapes and find the less frequent shapes intrinsically...

The literature on market timing of long-term debt issuance yields mixed evidence that managers can successfully time their debt-maturity issuance. The early results that are indicative of debt-maturity timing are not robust to accounting for structural breaks or to other measures of debt...

This paper estimates the implied cost of equity for Canadian and U.S. firms using a methodology based on the dividend discount model and utilizing firms' current stock price and analysts' forecasted earnings. We find that firm size and firm stock liquidity are negatively related to cost of...

I build a model of optimal managerial compensation where managers each have a privately observed propensity to manipulate short-term stock prices. It is shown that this informational asymmetry reverses some of the conventional wisdom about the relationship between reliance on short-term pay and...