We evaluate the effect of index option initiation on a stock market in which short sales are prohibited. Our focus is the effect on the price volatility of the underlying asset. In a very simple dynamic model with successive generations of single-period investors, we show that volatility can...

Motivated by theoretical models in economics which show that there is matching between CEO skill and firm size, we introduce a new measure of director skill which is based on the aggregate size of firms on which the director serves as an independent director. We validate our measure by showing...

We introduce a measure of corporate governance based on the degree of transparency and managerial opportunism in firms' guidance release policy. Firms with a good quality of guidance governance have better performance than firms with a poor quality of guidance governance and firms that do not...

Using combinations of weekdays and times of day (before, during, and after trading hours) of earnings announcements, we examine whether managers attempt to strategically time these announcements. We document that the worst earnings news is announced on Friday evening and find robust evidence...

We report reduced market response to Friday announcements of dividend changes, seasoned equity offerings, open-market share repurchases, earnings, and mergers, which is seemingly consistent with the notion of investor inattention on Fridays. However, we show that these findings are an outcome of...

The paper finds that CEOs time their trades in their own company's stock better than the average investor. While this could suggest that CEOs take advantage of their access to nonpublic information at the shareholders' expense, trade timing can be a desirable CEO characteristic for investors if...

Analysts' functions are divided into discovery and interpretation roles, but separating between the two is non-trivial. We conjecture that analysts' interpretation skill can be gauged by their forecast revisions following material unanticipated news — in particular following non-earnings 8-K...

We analyze the effects of partisan Congressional control on the US economy. We find that economic performance is weaker when no party has the majority in both chambers of Congress (divided Congress). This weaker economic performance is attributed to reduced and less effective regulation. We...

We analyze the puzzling behavior of the volatility of individual stock returns around the turn of the Millennium. There has been much academic interest in this topic, but no convincing explanation has arisen. Our goal is to pull together the many competing explanations currently proposed in the...