Managers raise financing (do not raise financing) when the benefit of financing exceeds (is less than) the cost of raising financing. Using this intuition, I develop a method to extract the benefits and costs of raising financing by observing the financing decisions managers actually make....

Using an econometric model to estimate issue costs for new external capital, I provide evidence that challenges the pecking order's predictions. Strongly counter to the pecking order, I find that debt costs often exceed equity costs, especially for firms without access to public debt. While the...

CEOs are paid more if they outperform other firms in their blockholders' portfolios. For every percentage point by which their own firm's return exceeds the return of the largest blockholder's basket of investments in a year, their compensation increases by over $9,800. Once we benchmark to this...

We document that there was media hype about internet stocks during the bubble. However, the media hype about internet stocks during the bubble was discounted: though the media coverage positively affected pre-IPO value revisions, it affected internet IPOs more than non-internet IPOs only after...

We do three things in this paper. We first develop a metric to measure the popularity of the value-weighted portfolio in a stock market. We use our metric to document that, though the value-weighted portfolio is less popular in emerging markets than in developed markets, its popularity is...

We read all news items that came out between 1996 and 2000 on 458 internet IPOs and a matching sample of 458 non-internet IPOs - a total of 171,488 news items - and classify each news item as good news, neutral news, or bad news. We first document that the media was more positive for internet...

Using a comprehensive sample of 2,361 public U.S. corporate defendants and 715 public foreign corporate defendants in U.S. federal courts in the period 1995-2000, we find that the market reaction at the announcement of a U.S. federal lawsuit is less negative for U.S. corporate defendants. We...

We study the effect of changes in CEO inside debt on equity and debt values during the period in which firms' disclosure of inside debt increased. We predict optimal CEO relative debt-equity incentive ratios based on firm and CEO characteristics, and show that firms adjust their ratios towards...

We read all news items that came out between 1996 and 2000 on 458 internet IPOs and a matching sample of 458 non-internet IPOs - a total of 171,488 news items - and classify each news item as good news, neutral news, or bad news. We first document that the media was more positive for internet...