Both theory and evidence are mixed regarding the impact on prices of trading on “dark” venues partially exempt from National Market System requirements. Theory predicts that price discovery improves as dark venues siphon noisy uninformed trades, but increased adverse selection reduces...

Disclosure is of fundamental interest to accounting research. When the sign/magnitude of disclosed news is unclear, research infers the information content of disclosures using the ratio of return volatilities during disclosure event and non-event windows (Beaver, 1968). We show the ratio is...

We investigate the joint hypothesis that a) tax expense contains information about core profitability that is incremental to reported earnings and b) that information is reflected in stock prices with a delay. We find that seasonally-differenced quarterly tax expense, our proxy for tax expense...

Both intuition and evidence suggest that tax expense reflects value lost to taxes paid. Inconsistent with this traditional valuation role for tax expense, some recent research finds that tax expense surprise, especially its current component, is positively associated with stock returns. Holding...

Prior research has documented that earnings announcements provide information not only about the announcing firm but also about other firms in the same industry. We document a stock market anomaly associated with this phenomenon of intra-industry information transfers by showing that the stock...

Prior research has documented that earnings announcements provide information not only about the announcing firm but also about other firms in the same industry. We document a stock market anomaly associated with this phenomenon of intra-industry information transfers by showing that the stock...

Prior research documents a negative link between risk and executive holding of stock (generally positive link is observed for options). We find a similar negative relation for non-executive holding of stock. Our finding is consistent with the view that non-executives not only face significant...

We find evidence that performance — reflected in earnings and cash flows — is transferred from targets to acquirers around acquisitions. Using a sample of 2,128 completed deals from 1985-2010, our results suggest that targets depress performance when investor attention declines once the deal...