This paper analyzes the issue costs and initial pricing of bonds in the international market. In particular, we investigate the determinants of three components of issue costs: underwriter fee, underwriter spread (the difference between the offering price and the guaranteed price to the issuer), and underpricing (the difference between the market price and the offering price). Total underwriter compensation increases with the bonds’ credit risk and maturity, but it is insignificantly related to issue size. Interestingly, underwriters appear to price some issue characteristics directly (by adjusting the fee) and other characteristics indirectly (by setting the guaranteed price). The two compensation components (fee and spread) are negatively related to each other. We provide evidence that this trade-off is consistent with income tax considerations, as well as with two-tier pricing by underwriters. We find no evidence of underpricing.

This study compares the issuance costs of Eurobonds before and after the completion of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) in 2002. We find that the introduction of the Euro has significantly reduced the issue cost of Euro-denominated bonds compared to bonds denominated in the legacy currencies. The reduction in issue cost is not due to a decrease in underwriter compensation, but rather to the elimination of underpricing (the difference between the market price after trading commences and the offering price). Underwriter fee has declined substantially after the completion of the EMU, but this decline has been offset by an increase in underwriter spread (the difference between the offering price and the guaranteed price to the issuer), leaving total underwriter compensation unchanged. The EMU is also associated with significant reductions in bond maturity and syndicate size, consistent with its expected effects on liquidity and issue costs in the Eurobond market.

We investigate the relation between dividend changes and future profitability, measured in terms of either future earnings or future abnormal earnings. Supporting “the information content of dividends hypothesis,” we find that dividend changes provide information about the level of profitability in subsequent years, incremental to market and accounting data. We also document that dividend changes are positively related to earnings changes in each of the two years after the dividend change.

We examine changes in banks’ market-to-book ratios over the last decade, focusing on the dramatic and persistent declines witnessed during the financial crisis. The extent of the decline and its persistence cannot be explained by the delayed recognition of losses on existing financial instruments. Rather, it is declines in the values of intangibles – including customer relationships and other intangibles related to business opportunities – along with unrecognized contingent obligations that account for most of the persistent decline in market-to-book ratios. These shifts reflect a combination of changed economic circumstances (e.g., low interest rates reduce the value of core deposits; meager growth opportunities reduce the value of customer relationships) and changed regulatory policies. Together, these changes in the business environment since the financial crisis have led investors to associate little value with intangibles. For example, changing market perceptions of the consequences of leverage have affected the way investors value banks; prior to the crisis, higher leverage, ceteris paribus, was associated with greater value (reflecting the high relative cost of equity finance), but during and after the crisis, as default risk and regulatory concerns came to the fore, lower leverage was associated with greater value. Reflecting the rising importance of regulatory risks (e.g., the uncertain consequences of the Volcker Rule), after controlling for other influences, dividend payments (a signal of management and regulatory perceptions of the persistence of financial strength) matter for market prices much more after the crisis, while increases in recurring fee income matter less.

The accruals anomaly — the negative relationship between accounting accruals and subsequent stock returns — has been well documented in the academic and practitioner literatures for almost a decade. To the extent that this anomaly represents market inefficiency, one would expect sophisticated investors to learn about it and arbitrage the anomaly away. We show that the accruals anomaly still persists and, even more strikingly, its magnitude has not declined over time. How can this be explained? We show that the accruals anomaly is recognized and, indeed, exploited by certain active institutional investors, but the magnitude of this accruals‐related trading is rather small. By and large, institutions shy away from extreme‐accruals firms because their attributes, such as small size, low profitability, and high risk stand in stark contrast to those preferred by most institutions. Individual investors are also, by and large, unable to profit from trading on accruals information due to the high information and transaction costs associated with implementing a consistently profitable accruals strategy. Consequently, the accruals anomaly persists and will probably endure.

Numerous studies have documented that stock returns are negatively related to changes in interest rates, but there has been little corroborating research on the information in interest‐rate changes about the fundamentals that the stock market prices. The negative correlation is often attributed to changes in the discount rate, a denominator effect in a valuation model. However, there may also be a numerator effect on the expected payoffs that are discounted. This paper shows that changes in interest rates are positively related to subsequent earnings, but the change in earnings is typically not large enough to cover the change in the required return. Hence, the net (numerator and denominator) effect on equity value is negative, consistent with the results of the research on interest rates and stock returns.

We investigate the ability of a tax-based fundamental—the ratio of tax-to-book income—to predict earnings growth and stock returns and to explain the earnings-price ratio. This tax fundamental reflects both temporary and permanent book-tax differences as well as tax accruals, such as changes in the tax valuation allowance. We find that the tax-to-book income ratio predicts subsequent five-year earnings changes, both before and after the implementation of Statement of Financial Accounting Standards (SFAS) No. 109 in 1993. For the pre-SFAS No. 109 period, the tax information is unrelated to contemporaneous earnings-price ratios and strongly related to subsequent stock returns. Conversely, for the post-SFAS No. 109 period, the tax fundamental is strongly related to contemporaneous earnings-price ratios and only weakly related to subsequent stock returns, indicating improvement over time in investors' perceptions of the implications of the tax information for future earnings. Deferred taxes, a component of our tax fundamental and the focus of recent research, exhibits relatively modest ability to predict earnings or stock returns both before and after the implementation of SFAS No. 109. Finally, throughout the examined period, the taxable income information about future earnings is incremental to that in accruals and cash flows.