Recent literature has documented a link between institutional equity ownership (IO) and cost of debt capital, and interpreted it as a corporate governance effect. However, institutional equity investors may also affect cost of debt through their influence on information asymmetry condition of...

This paper investigates, both theoretically and empirically, how earnings management and ownership retention interact, and how these two jointly affect the equilibrium market valuation of IPO firms in the presence of information asymmetry. Analytically, this paper extends the univariate...

We survey the textual sentiment literature, comparing and contrasting the various information sources, content analysis methods, and empirical models that have been used to date. We summarize the important and influential findings about how textual sentiment impacts on individual, firm-level and...

Context specific language or jargon helps, by definition, to efficiently and precisely transfer information. However, due to its complex nature, jargon might also be a tool to obfuscate information. This paper studies whether jargon is used in verbal firm disclosures to obfuscate or to...

Recent research finds that investors, broadly defined, react to the linguistic tone of quarterly earnings conference calls; there is a positive relation between firms' stock returns and call tone (a measure of “sentiment” related word tabulations). However, this type of soft information can...

We examine the long-run implications of debt structure adjustments using a sample of U.S. bond IPOs from 1971 to 1994. Bond IPOs result in simultaneous and pronounced changes in both debt maturity and debt ownership structures. We document that firms engaging in debt IPOs substantially...

In this paper, I exploit the syndicated loan market to explore the impact of information asymmetry on the cost of debt capital. As a measure of information asymmetry associated with a borrowing firm, I use the bid-ask spread on the firm's loans traded on the secondary loan market. I find that a...

Firms enjoy a wide degree of discretion in their disclosure of events in the patent granting process, which investors generally view as "good news" announcements. This study examines the timing of patent disclosure in conjunction with earnings announcements in light of managers' incentives to...

Losses from frauds and financial scams are estimated to exceed U.S. $5 trillion annually. To study the economics of financial scams, we investigate the market for initial coin offerings (ICOs) using point-in-time data snapshots of 5935 ICOs. Our evidence indicates that ICO issuers strategically...