We test the predictability of investment fraud using a panel of mandatory disclosures filed with the SEC. We find that disclosures related to past regulatory and legal violations, conflicts of interest, and monitoring have significant power to predict fraud. Avoiding the 5% of firms with the...

Basel II defines operational risk as the risk of direct or indirect loss resulting from inadequate or failed internal processes people or systems or from external events. In the past decade there have appeared a number of quantitative approaches to measuring this risk, approaches that abstract...

This paper analyzes how government intervention in the market for banks' troubled assets is best designed, and also uses this analysis to evaluate the public-private investment program announced by the U.S. government in March 2009. I begin by presenting the case for using government funds to...

We document that CRSP and Thomson contain a large number of voluntarily reported mutual fund portfolios that are not in SEC filings while, additionally, CRSP and Thomson are missing a large number of SEC mandated portfolios available in SEC filings. Voluntary disclosure is likely motivated by...

Using a parsimonious measure of investor protection constructed from fund organizational characteristics, this paper documents that companies targeted by activists with better investor protection structures outperform those targeted by poor-investor-protection activists by roughly 10% per year....

This paper studies the “confidential holdings” of institutional investors, especially hedge funds, where the quarter-end equity holdings are disclosed with a significant delay through amendments to the Form 13F. Our evidence supports hiding private information as the dominant motive for...