Despite high levels of asymmetry of information, firms that issue SEOs within a year of their IPO (follow-on SEOs) are able to offer shares at a lower discount compared to more mature firms. We provide evidence that this seeming contradiction can be explained by a very high degree of demand for...

We explore the information content of counterparty identities and how their disclosure can be exploited by other investors in a post-trade transparent market. Using data from the Helsinki Stock Exchange, we form dynamic mean-variance strategies with daily rebalancing which condition on the net...

We present comprehensive evidence in support of giving liquidity equal standing to size, value/growth, and momentum as investment styles, as defined by Sharpe (1992). First, we show that financial market liquidity, as identified by stock turnover, is an economically significant indicator of...

This paper studies how legal sanctions and enforcement affect brokers' conflicts of interest emanating from investment banking activities. We exploit the recent adoption of the Market Abuse Directive (MAD) across European countries and use the variation in legal sanctions and enforcement that...

Prior research has addressed the question of whether certain events cause a transfer of wealth between stockholders and bondholders but does not control for the events' impacts on firms' credit risk. This may explain why many studies fail to identify wealth transfers. By employing announcements...

In this paper, we study whether firm intangible information affects analyst behavior. We find direct evidence that when analysts make more judgment-intensive decisions, such as issuing stock recommendations, they overweight intangible information, leading to overreaction to intangible...

This paper establishes that credit ratings affect the choice of payment method in mergers and acquisitions. We find that bidders holding a high rating level are more likely to use cash financing in a takeover. We attribute this finding to lower financial constraints and enhanced capability of...

This paper examines whether star-analysts have better forecasting abilities than non-star-analysts. Our results reveal that star-analysts' earnings forecasts outperform their peers' forecasts. Because the level of corporate governance plays an important role for the general level of forecast...

How do analysts develop their forecasts? In this paper, we analyze how sell-side analysts estimate target prices and show that they consistently employ subjective adjustments to baseline models. For a panel of analyst reports, we show that target price forecasts that deviate significantly from...

The expectations management literature has so far focused on firms meeting the analyst consensus forecast — the expectations of analysts as a group — at earnings announcements. In this study we argue that investors may use individual analyst forecasts as additional benchmarks in evaluating...