This study uses 469,816 monthly observations of US public firms for the period 1990-2018 to document a strong positive relationship between short-term changes in financial distress risk and future stock price crashes. This result is economically significant as a one interquartile increase of the...

We examine the economic content of accruals and investment and test whether they are related to nonlinear equity value and asymmetric returns arising from firm growth. We confirm that current accruals mainly reflect capital investment commitment to assets in place arising from past growth,...

This study investigates CEOs' opportunistic activities in the years prior to their departures. The findings show that the occurrence of a stock price crash is heightened prior to the departure of the CEO. Particularly, one and two years before the CEO departure, firms experience 24.5% and 23.9%...

We examine the rate of return earned by global funds on equity investment in emerging markets (EMs) particularly the role played by sovereign credit risk. Changes in sovereign credit ratings (upgrades/downgrades) influence excess (over risk free rate) returns earned by foreign investors: lower...

We analyze the cross-sectional relation between expected idiosyncratic volatility and stock returns. The expected idiosyncratic volatility is conditioned on macro-finance factors as well as traditional asset pricing factors. The macro-finance factors are constructed from a large set of...