While it is generally maintained that earnings management can occur to inform as well as to mislead, evidence that earnings management informs has been scarce, and evidence that credibility increases with signal costliness inexistent. We provide evidence that firms use discretion over financial...

While increases in earnings are common, we identify a setting in which they signal a separating equilibrium. Firms that “defy gravity' (DG) by reporting increases in earnings despite experiencing a decline in sales from continuing operations, signal their viability as a going- concern, and...

We examine the economic determinants of short-sale supply, and its consequences for future stock returns. Lendable supply increases with expected borrowing costs and decreases with financial statement constructs that indicate overvaluation. Although rising loan fees help ease supply, we find...

A technology with increasing marginal costs produces indivisible units of service. Each agent wants at most one unit of service. We compare two natural mechanisms where users have free access to the technology. In one mechanism, Average Cost, each user pays the same average cost, in the other,...

This paper considers the impact of privatization on corporate entrepreneurship. The proposed model illustrates how a firm's capacity to implement internal changes is influenced by three factors: credibility of the privatization process, speed of the process, and the new regulatory environment....

This paper is an investigation into whether and under which conditions consistency between brand name and logo may positively influence consumer attitudes toward brands through three studies.

The competitive equilibrium correspondence, which associates equilibrium prices of commodities and assets with allocations of endowments, identifies the preferences and beliefs of individuals under uncertainty; this is the case even if the asset market is incomplete.

Should you set up your own sales force or should you outsouce it? The standard analysis uses a cost basis to answer this question. It assumes that the direct sales force is largely a fixed cost and that the outsourced sales force is largely a cost that varies with sales. It then calculates the...

This paper focuses on the predictability of the duration between intra-day price changes of stocks from the CAC 40, as well as on the predictability of the returns generated by these price changes. It is argued that traders with different time horizons will look at series of price changes...

A previous article investigated the semantic distinction between the analytical and the synthetic, and applied it to microeconomics; in the present one, the fundamental propositions of this field come to terms with the epistemological distinction between the a priori and the a posteriori (or...