Start-ups and early-stage firms employ many people, innovate, and often grow rapidly. In the current recession, however, the increase in entrepreneurial activity does not necessarily mean good news about the state of the economy

The market for small-firm funds is constantly in flux. Imbalances in both the supply and the demand for capital can trace either to the flow of funds or to the flow of available deals. The legal environment can and does change, and can sometimes drive temporary supply and demand imbalances....

We use a discrete choice recursive model to classify 629 companies with dividend reinvestment plans (DRIPs) in 1999 and 514 companies without them. Our model classifies 72.0% of companies correctly. We interpret misclassified companies as being likely to switch their plan status. For example, if...

Questions about the future of the Social Security system continue to surface. As a result, interest in employer-sponsored retirement plans and other retirement investment options increases. But the restrictions and rules associated with various defined benefit plans such as 401(k), 403 (b), and...

The authors introduce a novel statistical modeling technique to cluster analysis and apply it to financial data. Their two main goals are to handle missing data and to find homogeneous groups within the data. Their approach is flexible and handles large and complex data structures with missing...

This paper estimates the impact of market activity and news on the volatility of returns in the exchange market for Japanese Yen and US dollars. We examine the effects of news on volatility before, during and after news arrival, using three categories of news. Market activity is proxied by quote...

Previous research has concluded that prespecified asset allocations used by many Section 529 college savings plans are suboptimal. We extend this research to show that though it may be true, it is true for reasons other than those asserted in previous research. In addition, it tends to deflect...

We generalize traditional event-study techniques to allow for event-induced parameter shifts, shifting variances, and firm-specific event periods. Our method, which nests traditional methods, also permits systematic risk to change gradually during the event period and exit the period at higher...

What is a market friction? In the context of the capital asset pricing model, this article defines a financial market friction as anything that interferes with trade. This interference includes two dimensions. First, financial market frictions cause a market participant to deviate from holding...

We conduct an empirical investigation to explain observed differentials in mortgage overage pricing. Our analysis makes several contributions. First, we study an area of mortgage pricing that is little understood by consumers and has received little scrutiny in the literature. Second, we...