This paper proposes a new approach to infer a firm-specific measure of the implied cost of capital. It incorporates endogenously estimated industry-year growth rate of the net present value of future investments. It requires only one-year-ahead forecasts of earnings, and dividend payout policy...

This paper examines the cross-sectional relation between leverage and future stock returns. Prior research documents a puzzling negative correlation. We show that it is largely caused by firms' use of internal financing when having significant off-balance-sheet operating assets due to...

Using a novel hand-collected dataset of business combination disclosures, we investigate whether and how fair-value adjustments (FVAs) arising from mergers and acquisitions facilitate debt financing. FVAs are the difference between the fair value and the book value of the target's net assets. We...

We propose a novel method to forecast corporate earnings, which combines the accuracy of analysts' forecasts with the unbiasedness of a cross-sectional model. We build on recent insights from the earnings forecasts literature to improve analysts' forecasts in two ways: reducing their...

Numerous influential critics and corporate managers allege that activist investors demand changes that increase short-term stock prices at the expense of long-term shareholder value (“short-termism”). Research to-date focuses on hedge funds. We provide new evidence by using a larger sample...

This study examines the association between chief executive officer (CEO) overconfidence and future stock price crash risk. Overconfident managers overestimate the returns to their investment projects and misperceive negative net present value (NPV) projects as value creating. They also tend to...

The Spanish version of this paper can be found http://ssrn.com/abstract=1899685This paper estimates the value of tax shields, using the discounted cash flow method for 23 major non financial firms listed in the Bolsa de Valores de Colombia (Colombian Stock Exchange) between 2001 and 2010. Our...

The English version of this paper can be found at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1919305This paper estimates the value of tax shields, using the discounted cash flow method for 23 major non financial firms listed in the Bolsa de Valores de Colombia (Colombian Stock Exchange) between 2001 and 2010. Our...

This study examines the accounting information uncertainty effects on corporate credit risk from the perspective of real earnings management (RM) activities by investigating 9,565 American bond observations from year 2001 to 2008. The main results show that the volatilities of RM activities...

The computation of implied cost of capital (ICC) is constrained by the lack of analyst forecasts for half of all firms. Hou, van Dijk, and Zhang (2012, HVZ) present a cross-sectional model to generate forecasts in order to compute ICC. However, the forecasts from the HVZ model perform worse than...