In Chapter 2, "Accounting for Cross-Country Differences in Intergenerational Earnings Persistence: The Impact of Taxation and Public Education Expenditure," I study the determinants of cross-country differences in intergenerational earnings persistence between fathers and sons. Western economies...

This thesis consists of three chapters, each of which focuses on different aspects of economic inequality.First, we investigate the differences in wage inequality between the United States and continental European countries (CEU). Wage inequality has been significantly higher in the US compared...

This article documents the long-horizon mean reverting character of annual earnings and tests the implications of such mean reversion for security valuation. First, both theory-based and nonparametric measures of earnings persistence decrease as the estimation order increases, revealing 40...

The paper sets an accounting and behavioral framework from which we derive a reduced-form equation to test income smoothing and capital management practices through loan loss provisions (PLL) by Spanish banks. Spain offers a unique environment to perform those tests because there are very...

Los bancos españoles tuvieron que realizar provisiones estadísticas contracíclicas en el período 2000-2004. Los bancos tenían que comunicar los importes de dichas provisiones al mercado. Esto crea un experimento natural que permite testar si los bancos suavizan el resultado para despistar a...

This paper studies the effects of stock splits on returns using daily data from the Singapore Stock Exchange over the period 1983-2000. Specifically, it examines whether stock split announcements provide credible signals due to asymmetry of information. We find that the market, on average,...

This study is an empirical examination of a new theory that links dividends to institutional ownership in a framework of both information signaling and agency costs. Under this theory put forth by Allen, Bernardo and Welch in 2000, dividends are paid out to attract tax-favored institutional...

This dissertation is composed of three essays considering the role of private information in economic environments. The first essay considers efficient investments into technologies such as auditing and enforcement systems that are designed to mitigate information and enforcement frictions that...

Drawing on the theoretical and empirical evidence that private information risk is priced in the expected returns of equities, we hypothesize that information risk premium is an important component of the risk premium that leads to the violation of uncovered interest rate parity (UIRP). Using an...

We study the quantitative properties of constrained efficient allocations in an environment where risk sharing is limited by the presence of private information. We consider a life cycle version of a standard Mirrlees economy where shocks to labor productivity have a component that is public...