The 2008 financial crisis has its origins in the US real estate market. By means of purchases of US mortgage-backed securities it spread to the portfolios of financial companies everywhere in the world and it is making its way to the real economy. The measures to be taken include cutting...

We study the behavior of short sellers as informed market participants and examine potential sources of their information. Using a newly available dataset with high-frequency short sales data, we find evidence of significant increases in short sales immediately prior to large insider sales, but...

Building upon recent research suggesting that debt markets rather than equity markets shape financial reporting, this study examines the relationship between conditional conservatism (used as a proxy for information risk) and the underpricing of newly issued corporate bonds. There are two...

We examine whether and how German and US investment professionals use corporate social responsibility (hereafter, CSR) information when making personal investment decisions and recommendations to clients. Using an experiment, we find that both German and US investment professionals use CSR...

We investigate the ex-dividend behaviour of TSX listed Canadian firms during a period when both U.S and Canadian governments cut taxes on dividend income. We test whether the tax differential between dividends and capital gains affects the stock price drop ratio on ex-dividend date. Using...

This study examines how key market participants — managers and analysts — responded to SFAS 123R's controversial requirement that firms recognize stock-based compensation expense. Despite mandated recognition of the expense, some firms' managers exclude it from pro forma earnings and some...

This paper investigates the impact of disclosure regulation on import competition. Using the segment disclosure regulation (SFAS 131) as a plausibly exogenous shock that increases the supply of mandatory information about U.S. product markets, I uncover an increase in U.S. import competition at...

With the arrival of the new millennium, many industries across the developed economies are increasingly facing volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous business environments-often characterized as VUCA-caused by a host of disruptive factors hyper-competition, globalized value chains,...

We explore empirically how capital inflows into the US and financial deregulation within the United States interacted in driving the run-up (and subsequent decline) in US housing prices over the period 1990-2012. To obtain an ex ante measure of financial liberalization, we focus on the history...

The financial crisis of 2007-09 has sparked keen interest in models of financial frictions and their impact on macro activity. Most models share the feature that borrowers suffer a contraction in the quantity of credit. However, the evidence suggests that although bank lending contracted during...