Deregulation of the trucking industry and significantly lowered transportation costs led to large, widespread, and plausibly exogenous reductions in inventory for U.S. firms, but with consequent increased supply chain disruption costs. We find evidence that increased supply chain disruption...

We investigate the relation between common institutional ownership of the firms in an industry and product market competition. We find that common ownership is neither robustly positively related with industry profitability or output prices nor robustly negatively related with measures of...

This paper examines firms' voluntary disclosures regarding open market repurchase programs, i.e., announcements that firms have suspended, resumed, or completed repurchases. Abnormal returns around announcements are, on average, positive when firms voluntarily announce repurchase resumptions or...

This paper investigates whether leveraged buyouts (LBOs) increase the bargaining power of firms with their suppliers. We find that suppliers to LBO firms experience significantly negative abnormal returns at the announcements of downstream LBOs. We also find that suppliers who have likely made...

We investigate the upstream and downstream product-market effects of a large sample of horizontal mergers and acquisitions from 1980-1997. We construct a dataset that identifies the corporate customers, suppliers, and rivals of the firms initiating horizontal mergers and use this dataset to...

Managers frequently cite the desire to mitigate asymmetric information as a motivation for increasing firm focus. The information benefits of focus appear relevant for the subset of firms that actually increase their focus; however, the relevance of focus-related information benefits for the...

This paper investigates the timing and source of anomalous positive long-run abnormal returns following repurchase authorizations. Returns between program authorization and completion announcements are indistinguishable from zero. Abnormal returns occur only after completion announcements....

There is no clear theoretical consensus about the overall effect of firm diversification on the magnitude of asymmetric information problems that firms face. We therefore compare stock market based measures of asymmetric information for diversified firms with those they could reasonably expect...

This paper exploits the 1990 change in capital adequacy regulations to construct more powerful tests of capital and earnings management effects on bank loan loss provisions. We find strong support for the hypothesis that loan loss provisions are used for capital management. We do not find...