This paper provides evidence that the availability of individual stock options adds value to security issuers. We focus on convertible bond issues because pricing convertible bonds requires essentially the same set of information necessary to price options. By exploiting the SEC’s minimum...

Mutual fund families increasingly hold bonds and stocks from the same firm. We study the implications of such dual holdings for corporate governance and firm decision-making by exploiting variations in dual ownership resulting from the rise in the popularity of bond mutual funds and from...

Mutual fund families increasingly hold bonds and stocks from the same firm. We study the implications of such dual holdings for corporate governance and firm decision-making. We present evidence that dual ownership allows financially distressed firms to increase investments and to refinance by...

Non-standard errors capture uncertainty due to variation in research design choices. We study the importance of differential design choices in constructing asset pricing factors. By purposely data mining over 250 different versions of each factor, we find that Sharpe ratios exhibit substantial...

This study examines the role of differences in firms' propensity to meet earnings expectations in explaining why firms with high analyst forecast dispersion experience relatively low future stock returns. We first demonstrate that the negative relation between dispersion and returns is...

Current attempts to reform financial markets presume that shareholder empowerment benefits shareholders. We investigate the wealth effects associated with the SEC's rule to facilitate director nominations by shareholders. Our results are not in line with shareholder empowerment creating value:...

While convertible offerings announced between 1984 and 1999 induce average abnormal stock returns of −1.69%, convertible announcement effects over the period 2000 to 2008 are more than twice as negative (−4.59%). We hypothesize that this evolution is attributable to a shift in the...

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...