Does transparency harm block traders? In 2004, Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) mandated the disclosure of trades accumulating to more than 0.5% of existing float in a single day. Using unique transaction-level database from the National Stock Exchange (NSE) in India, we present...

The underpricing of initial public offerings (IPOs) is a deeply investigated phenomenon, commonly explained with asymmetric information and risk. Ellul and Pagano (2006) first linked the underpricing with liquidity proxies like liquidity risk and effective spread. In this paper I propose a...

Over the past decade there has been mixed evidence on the lead-lag relation between issuer-paid and investor-paid credit rating agencies. We investigate the lead-lag relationship for changes in bond ratings (BRs) and financial strength ratings (FSRs), for the US insurance industry, where FSRs...

Certain corporate transactions (eg. insider purchases and buyback announcements) are known to be robust predictors of firm-level returns. However, I empirically show equity analysts largely ignore such informative, yet subtle, signals of stocks they cover. A trading strategy that follows...

Form S-1 is the first SEC filing in the initial public offering (IPO) process. The tone of the S-1, in terms of its definitiveness in characterizing the firm's business strategy and operations, should affect investors' ability to value the IPO. We find that IPOs with high levels of uncertain...

We examine whether the informativeness of sell-side analyst reports depends on the strength of the regulatory environment of a country and the regulatory background of the institutional investors of a company. Our analyses are based on more than 600,000 analyst reports from 2005 through 2010...

This paper provides primary evidence of whether certification via reputable underwriters is beneficial to investors in the corporate bond market. We focus on the high-yield bond market, in which certification of issuer quality is most valuable to investors owing to low liquidity and issuing...

Whether higher idiosyncratic return volatility means more or less informative stock prices is an ongoing debate. All the existing literature relies on cross-sectional evidence, which makes it hard to isolate the effects of price informativeness on idiosyncratic volatility from other effects. I...

This paper examines how the information quality of ratings from an issuer-paid rating agency (Standard and Poor's) responds to the entry of an investor-paid rating agency, the Egan-Jones Rating Company (EJR). By comparing S&P's ratings quality before and after EJR initiates coverage of each...

We propose that when a firm cross-lists in segmented markets, in pricing the second issued share, the first issued share price as a reference plays both an informational and anchoring role. We develop a model illustrating the dual-role and relating the anchoring bias to the IPO underpricing of...