We examine a firm’s P/E ratio in the context of a model wherein firms make sequential investments in production capacity. In addition to investment growth, our analysis seeks to identify pricing power in the firm’s product markets and accounting conservatism as determinants of the P/E ratio. A benchmark result demonstrates that, given unbiased accounting, the firm’s P/E ratio can be expressed a...

This paper suggests a solution to the puzzling finding documented in Moskowitz and Vissing-Jorgensen (2002) that the return to an index of private equity is equal to the return to the CRSP index of public equity even though investment in private firms is substantially riskier. It presents an occupational choice model where human and financial capital can be jointly invested in a private busines...

This paper models the arrival rate of voluntary news announcements of the FTSE AllShare firms. We test to see if the earnings environment affects the volume of news announcements that firms release to the stock market. We also examine whether the other factors such as the size of a firm and the external coverage a firm receives affects the pattern of news disclosures. Our results show that firm...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the determinants of the timing of bank failure/merger in 10 Asian countries over the period of 1999-2007 using a multivariate logit model and a split population duration analysis. Apart from bank-specific information, we also focus on the effects of macroeconomic and financial characteristics. The following empirical findings are obtained. First, the resu...

We investigate the effects of social and regulatory forces on a firm’s decision to disclose past wrongdoing by voluntarily restating its earnings. With an eight-year sample of more than 2,500 public firms, including 170 voluntary restaters, we find that firms are more likely to voluntarily restate their earnings in response to informal social pressures from other firms in their industry and les...

T he U.S. distribution of labor earnings is highly skewed to the right. Roughly, the lowest 50 percent of U.S. households, as measured by individual labor earnings, make 10 percent of total labor earnings. The next lowest 30 percent earn approximately 30 percent and highest 10 percent make 40 percent.1 Earnings are also related to a person’s position within a firm and employment at a particular...

different levels of predisclosure information production and dissemination. Empirical evidence supports this size-related information Accordingly, because information search activities yield higher expected hypothesis. The magnitude of abnormal returns associated trading profits for larger firms, prices are “more informative” for larger with both good and bad earnings information has been shown...

Not all stock recommendation changes are equal. In a sample constructed to minimize the impact of confounding news, relatively few analyst recommendation changes are influential in the sense that they impact investors’ beliefs about a firm in a way that could be noticed in that firm’s stock returns. More than one-third of the stock-price reactions to analyst recommendation changes have the wron...

We provide evidence on the characteristics of local generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) earnings for firms cross-listing on U.S. exchanges relative to a matched sample of foreign firms currently not cross-listing in the United States to investigate whether U.S. listing is associated with differences in accounting data reported in local markets. We find that cross-listed firms differ...