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...

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...

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...

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...

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....

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...