In the first essay, "Do Firms Knowingly Sell Overvalued Equity?", I develop a simple equilibrium model which shows that insider trading around seasoned equity offerings (SEO) depends on both the quality of issuing firms and insiders' exogenous consumption shocks, neither of which are known by...

In Chapter I, the firm's accounts receivable sales decision is modeled both in the case where it is constrained to sell the entire receivable (factoring) and in the case where it has the flexibility to sell a portion of the receivable (receivables securitization.) It is found that because of a...

The economic analysis of financial intermediaries has been a growing field. The goal of many works in this area has been to show that contractual arrangements can lead to symmetric Pareto optimal allocations in an economy with asymmetric private information.

This is a study of financial and strategic factors relating to the failure and bankruptcy of 73 firms that went bankrupt from 1980 to 1986. The characteristics of the bankrupt firms were compared with those of a matching sample of nonbankrupt firms. On average the bankrupt firms were weaker than...

This dissertation consists of three essays. The first essay finds that small firms in poor quality legal environments (poor quality contract enforcement and property rights environments) are more financially constrained relative to small firms in better quality legal environments. Consequently,...

My dissertation consists of three essays on international capital flows. In the first essay, titled "Do small firms benefit more from foreign portfolio investment? Evidence from a Natural Experiment," I test whether an increase in the supply of foreign portfolio capital benefits small firms by...

The first essay examines news and the cross section of returns. Using a sentiment score provided by Thomson Reuters to measure the tone of news articles, this paper examines monthly portfolio returns constructed from information about past news articles. The sentiment score is obtained from the...

This dissertation consists of three essays on corporate pension plan underfunding and securities valuation. The first essay presents evidence that sell-side stock analysts systematically underreact to pension underfunding information when they forecast firm earnings and such underreaction is...

Master of Agribusiness