A rich literature argues that stock repurchases often serve as positive economic signals beneficial to investors. Yet due to their inherent flexibility, open market repurchase programs have long been criticized as weak signals lacking commitment. We evaluate whether some managers potentially use...

Using a novel dataset of firm-level perceived trustworthiness from the news media and social media, we find that lending banks charge significantly higher loan spread on firms with lower trustworthiness. Loans to these firms also tend to have shorter loan maturities, more financial covenants,...

Earnings manipulation has become a widespread practice for US corporations. However, most studies in the literature focus on whether certain incentives would facilitate managers to manipulate earnings and there has been little evidence documenting the consequences of earnings manipulation. This...

An exclusive focus on bottom-line income misses important information about the quality of earnings. Accruals (the difference between accounting earnings and cash flow) are reliably, negatively associated with future stock returns. Earnings increases that are accompanied by high accruals,...

Earnings manipulation has become a widespread practice for US corporations. However, most studies in the literature focus on whether certain incentives would facilitate managers to manipulate earnings and there has been little evidence documenting the consequences of earnings manipulation. This...

This paper explores whether firms manage their earnings after stock splits to meet the raised expectations from the market due to the positive signal sent by the splits. We first document that post-split drift mainly exists in the first three months and is positively associated with post-split...

An exclusive focus on bottom-line income misses important information about the quality of earnings. Accruals (the difference between accounting earnings and cash flow) are reliably, negatively associated with future stock returns. Earnings increases that are accompanied by high accruals,...

We hypothesize that high stock price levels impede informed trading on the stocks and reduce price informativeness. This is because uninformed trading is needed to facilitate informed trading, and high stock prices may impose budget constraints on uninformed investors. Indeed, we find, for...

An extensive literature shows that R&D intensities and increases are positively related to firm performance, but little research examines the valuation of R&D reductions. This paper fills the void by studying long-term performance following R&D reductions. We find that, contrary to conventional...

We examine the relationship between collective country reputations and foreign stock returns following news of corporate scandals. We find that investors punish not only the scandalous foreign firm but also other firms from the same country of origin, especially those coming from more...