Cash settlements became a popular design feature in convertible securities once they obtained favorable accounting treatment for diluted earnings per share in 2002. The unexpected proliferation of cash settlements provoked the FASB to eliminate their favorable accounting treatment in 2008. We...

Companies planning a private placement typically gauge the interest of institutional buyers before the offering is publicly announced. Regulators are concerned with this practice, called wall-crossing, as it might invite insider trading, especially when the potential investors are hedge funds....

Employees of liquidating firms are likely to lose income and non-pecuniary benefits of working for the firm, which makes bankruptcy costly for employees. This paper examines whether firms take these costs into account when deciding on the optimal amount of leverage. We find that firms with...

Dividend reinvestment plans (DRIPs) with discount offer shareholders the choice between receiving cash dividends or additional shares at a discount. We provide evidence on DRIP arbitrage where DRIP arbitrageurs extract the DRIP discount through short-term equity borrowing. We show the relation...

This study examines the role of expectations management in explaining why firms with high dispersion in analyst forecasts experience relatively low future stock returns. We first demonstrate that the negative relation between dispersion and returns is concentrated around earnings announcements...

Political risk relates to both the ability and the willingness of governments to repay debts. We find that bond prices only slowly adapt to changes in political risk. The expected bond returns for countries whose political risk ratings have improved are higher than those for countries whose...

We use meta-analysis to review studies on announcement effects associated with seasoned equity offerings. Our sample includes 199 studies from 38 leading finance journals and SSRN working papers. The studies cover different countries, but the U.S. is particularly well-represented with 131...

This study presents evidence suggesting that investors do not fully unravel predictable pessimism in sell-side analysts' earnings forecasts. We show that measures of prior consensus and individual analyst forecast pessimism are predictive of both the sign of firms' earnings surprises and the...

Over recent years, a substantial fraction of U.S. convertible bond issues have been combined with a stock repurchase. This paper explores the motivations for these combined transactions. We argue that convertible debt issuers buy back their stock in order to facilitate short selling by...

The static tradeoff theory of capital structure predicts that firms aim to approach a target debt ratio. The theory provides several firm characteristics that determine this target ratio. In contrast, the pecking order model rejects a target debt ratio, because firms are expected to finance...