Dividend-paying firms tend to manage earnings upward when their earnings would otherwise fall short of expected dividend levels. This behavior is evident only in firms with positive debt and is more aggressive prior to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, subsequent to the 2003 dividend tax cut, in...

We construct a large sample of both private and public firms from a broad set of industries to provide a direct comparison of efficiency, profitability, and incentive alignment. We find that operating profit scaled by sales and net profit to sales in private firms are less than half those in...

We address the practical question of whether investors and researchers are likely to make invalid inferences about fund manager performance when using the wrong model and/or benchmark. We consider three well-known models, those of Jensen (1968), Treynor and Mazuy (1966), and Henriksson and...

This paper examines the implications for mutual fund performance measurement of two likely sources of specification error. We compare three well-known models, those of Jensen (1968), Treynor and Mazuy (1966), and Henriksson and Merton (1981), and two commonly-used timing benchmarks, the Samp;P...