A common perspective in macro-finance analyses links firms’ borrowing constraints to the liquidation value of physical assets firms pledge as collateral. We empirically investigate borrowing by non-financial firms in the US. We find that 20% of corporate debt by value is collateralized by specific physical assets (“asset-based lending” in creditor parlance), while 80% is based predominantly on ...

This study uses data from the Panel Survey of Income Dynamics (PSID) to address a number of questions about life cycle earnings mobility. It develops a dynamic reduced form model of earnings and marital status that is nonstationary over the life cycle. The study reaches several "rm conclusions about life cycle earnings mobility. Incorporating non-Gaussian shocks makes it possible to better acco...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to add to our understanding of the monitoring role of multiple large shareholders by examining their impact on the informativeness of firms’ earnings. Design/methodology/approach – We use regression models that relate earnings to stock returns for a sample of 402 French publicly traded firms covered during 2003-2007. Findings – We show that earnings inform...

Earnings non-synchronicity captures the extent to which firm-specific factors determine a firm’s earnings, and has important implications to a firm’s information environment. Prior research shows that high earnings non-synchronicity impedes corporate outsiders’ information processing. Given managers generally possess superior information about their firms’ unique operating and reporting strateg...

The present study is intended to examine the effect of accounting conservatism on firms’ non-profitability in Tehran Stock Exchange in 48 unprofitable firms and 57 profitable firms over a period of seven years from 2001 to 2007. This study was conducted according to Givoly and Hayn model to measure accounting conservatism index in non-profitable and profitable) firms. Data analysis performed wi...

This paper seeks to analyze the dynamic behavior of prime-age male workers’ earnings inequality in the formal labor market of the State of São Paulo in the years 1990-1998. The aim is to fit an econometric model of unobserved earnings components into the empirical earnings variance-covariance structure in order to evaluate the relative magnitude of individual characteristics and earnings instab...

W correlate analysts’ forecast errors with temporal variation in investor sentiment. We find that when sentiment is high, analysts’ forecasts of one-year-ahead earnings and long-term earnings growth are relatively more optimistic for “uncertain” or “difficult-to-value” firms. Adding these forecast errors to a regression of stock returns on sentiment absorbs a sizable fraction of the explanatory...