Bankruptcy prediction models developed by Altman (1968) and Ohlson (1980) are often used in empirical accounting research to indicate firms' relative likelihoods of bankruptcy. However, use of these models in their original forms on current datasets may introduce measurement error into the...

This paper examines how market prices, volume, and traders' dividend expectations respond to public information releases in laboratory markets for a long-lived financial asset. The objective is to study deviations from the symmetric information risk-neutral rational expectations (RE) benchmark,...

Empirical accounting researchers often use Altman's (1968) and Ohlson's (1980) bankruptcy prediction models as indicators of financial distress. While these models performed relatively well when they were estimated, we show that they do not perform as well in more recent periods (in particular,...

This study examines whether the earnings quality of a firm that first announces quarterly earnings in its industry impacts the magnitude of intra-industry information transfers. Prior research shows that higher quality earnings better reflect the operating fundamentals of a firm. I argue that...

The two essays in this dissertation study issues related to debt contracting. The first essay examines whether aspects of debt contracting have been affected by the provisions of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 that increased monitoring of management's activities by independent directors,...

We consider a monopolist selling durable goods to consumers with unit demands but different preferences for quality. The seller can offer items of different quality at the same time to induce buyers to self-select, as in Mussa-Rosen (1978), but is not artificially constrained to offer only one...

In many applications, assumptions about the log-concavity of a probability distribution allow just enough special structure to yield a workable theory. This paper catalogs a series of theorems relating log-concavity and/or log-convexity of probability density functions, distribution functions,...