We investigate why firms include warrants in their initial public offerings (IPOs). We use a dataset of Australian IPOs to examine two hypotheses about the inclusion of warrants in an IPO. The agency-cost hypothesis emphasizes the need for sequential financing for relatively young firms, because...

Managers can decide to reduce a warrant's exercise price. A reduction in exercise price can induce exercise (a conversion-forcing reduction) or not (a long-term reduction). Conversion-forcing firms show an abnormal return of -1.53% on the announcement day but they perform well over the three...

We investigate the role of labor unions in the performance of venture capital (VC)-backed firms. Using a large sample of initial public offering firms from 1983 to 2013, we find that VC-backed firms in highly unionized industries have lower Tobin's Q and are less likely to survive. This effect...

Does it pay to voluntarily disclose the manager's private information about the firm's earnings prospects before the mandatory announcement date? This question has been a subject of much debate because prior research establishes both benefits and costs of early information disclosure. We provide...

In this paper we examine the market reaction - price and volume - to the appearance of a firm in the Who's News column of the Wall Street Journal. We differentiate between those firms whose articles are accompanied by a picture of an executive and a control set of firms whose articles on the...

We examine trading activity, bid-ask spreads, and potential arbitrage opportunities for market makers in the period around conversion-forcing calls of convertible preferred securities. We find an increased turnover in the called convertible preferred stock, which is consistent with a clientele...

We examine the intra-industry information effects of announcements of dividend initiations. Our results indicate that the stock prices of industry competitors do not react to dividend initiations. Further, analysts do not revise their earnings forecasts for nonannouncing, rival firms. These...

We investigate the consequences of mergers and acquisitions (M&As) for information asymmetry in the banking sector. We test competing hypotheses about the effect of M&As on the information environment. M&As either increase information asymmetry (the opacity hypothesis) or diminishes it (the...

We examine the impact of stock market liquidity on managerial payout decisions. We argue that stock market liquidity influences payout policy through a first-order effect on the share repurchase decision, and a second-order or residual effect on the dividend decision. Managers compare the tax...

Using more than 350,000 sell-side analyst recommendations from January 1994 to August 2006, this paper examines the predictive content of aggregate analyst recommendations. We find that changes in aggregate analyst recommendations forecast future market excess returns after controlling for...