This paper investigates the impact of political corruption on auditor behavior in the United States. We find that U.S. firms headquartered in more corrupt regions pay higher audit fees, have longer audit report lags, and are more likely to receive a going concern audit opinion. Political...

We examine the predictability of stock returns using implied volatility spreads (VS) from individual (non-index) options. Volatility spreads can occur under simple no-arbitrage conditions for American options when volatility is time-varying, suggesting that the VS-return predictability could be...

We investigate the time-series patterns in industry return predictability conditioned on insider demand from 1996 to 2016. Current insider demand within an industry is positively associated with higher future industry returns. This relation is primarily driven by the buy side of insider trades...

This paper documents that momentum profits in corporate bonds prevail during weakening aggregate credit conditions, and are driven by losers. Consistent with this, we find that a conditional default factor explains the cross-section returns of corporate bond portfolios sorted by past...

In this paper, we explain momentum profits using innovations in aggregate economy-wide default risk. First, we show that momentum returns are positive only during high default shocks and nonexistent otherwise. Second, we present evidence suggesting that a conditional default shock factor is...

Bank attention plays an important role in the pricing of corporate debt. Prior studies show that bank loans serve as certification and monitoring mechanisms that signal firm quality to bond markets. To separate continuous monitoring effects from certification effects, we use a measure of bank...