We investigate underlying factors that explain increases in the firm-specific volatilities of stock returns and fundamentals. We find that firm-specific volatilities are significantly higher in both manufacturing and non-manufacturing industries that are more information technology (IT)...

What is good for a country's leading corporations is generally not good for the country's overall economy. Turnover in the list of a country's top ten corporations between 1975 and 1996 is associated with faster overall economic growth, faster productivity growth, and (in high income countries)...

Corporate governance disasters could often be averted had directors asked their CEOs questions, demanded answers, and blown whistles. Work in social psychology by Milgram (1974) and others shows human subjects to have an innate predisposition to obey legitimate authority. This may explain...

Using 550 million limit orders submitted in the Korea Stock Exchange, we estimate demand and supply elasticities of heterogeneous investor types and their changes around the Asian financial crisis. We find that domestic individuals have substantially more inelastic demand and supply curves than...

The value of mandatory securities disclosure is intensely debated. Two big questions occupy much of the attention: Do more accurate share prices contribute to the efficient provision of goods and services in the economy? Even if they do, will mandatory disclosure effectively contribute to share...

Japan's corporate sector has, at different times in recent history, been organized according to every major model. Prior to World War II, wealth Japanese families locked in their control over large corporations by organizing them into pyramidal groups, called zaibatsu, similar to structures...

Arguments for eliminating the double taxation of dividends apply only to dividends paid by corporations to individuals. The double (and multiple) taxation of dividends paid by one firm to another - intercorporate dividends - was explicitly included in the 1930s to eliminate pyramidal corporate...

The efficient markets hypothesis implies that passive indexing should generate as high a return as active fund management. Indexing has been a very successful strategy. We document a large value premium in the average q ratios of firms in the Samp;P 500 index relative to the q ratios of other...

Roll (1988) observes low R2 statistics for common asset pricing models due to vigorous firms-specific returns variation not associated with public information. He concludes (p. 56) that this implies quot;either private information or else occasional frenzy unrelated to concrete information.quot;...

Japan's prolonged economic problems are due to more than faulty macro-economic policies. We do not deny the importance of bungled macro-economic policy, but argue that deeper maladies in Japanese corporate governance made that country increasingly vulnerable to such problems. We argue that...