Employing a new method of industry tests we examine investment bank governance. Most of the findings reject the view that banks are governed suboptimally over a sample period from 1990 through 2003. CEO pay is large and significantly sensitive to stock price performance, and stock price...

We examine analysts' earnings forecast behavior around SEOs. We document that equity issuers are among the high growth IBES firms that typically have much higher forecast errors. Adjusting for this bias we find that earnings per share forecasts around equity offerings are not more favorable than...

This study examines the behavior of spreads paid in firm underwritten seasoned common stock offerings and straight bond offerings. Estimates indicate that up to 85% of the spread is variable cost and that the marginal spread is rising. Further, offerings that are likely to require greater...

We assess investment banks' influence over the agreement between their analysts' research behavior and their clients' interests, in the post-reform era. Competing banks discipline their analysts with worse career outcomes for producing biased reports, issuing shirking reports, and for...

In the 1990s, over 85% of all initial public offerings (IPOs) in the US paid a 7% spread. Two hypotheses that may explain this convergence to 7% are one, that investment bankers colluded to profit from 7% IPOs or two, that the quot;7% contractquot; is an efficient innovative response the...

Li and You (this volume) study public firms' common stock return reactions to two events: when analysts' initiate coverage of the firm and when they terminate coverage. They test the returns for evidence of three sources of value added by analysts: (1) more monitoring of the firm, (2) reduced...

Contrary to the common view that analysts are important information agents, intraday returns evidence shows that announcements of analysts' forecast revisions release little new information, on average. Further cross-sectional evidence from returns around the announcements confirms that...

Discounting and underpricing spread across most seasoned equity offers in the 1990s and were four to five times higher than in earlier years - particularly for riskier and more difficult to market offers, which were more prevalent. Analyses suggest that expected discounting is a cost of...

We investigate the choice between hiring syndicates through competitive bidding and negotiation. Making syndicates compete can result in inferior terms because of inefficiencies like less effective search, possibly less total search, and trapped bidders. Empirical results are consistent with our...

For the period 1971-1991, we find that firms issue bonds when a significant long-term upturn in performance levels off. The performance is significantly above normal for the five-year pre-issuance period but quickly falls to normal in the issuance year and remains so for the next five years....