I provide new tests of regulatory impact on informed trading in the stock market. After the implementation of Reg FD there is a significant decrease in the Hasbrouck [Hasbrouck, J., 1991a. The summary informativeness of stock trades: an econometric analysis. Review of Financial Studies 4, 571–595.] summary informativeness statistic, a measure of informed trading based on intra-daily trade level data. But, the switch to decimalization on the New York Stock Exchange has a much larger impact on this measure. These results highlight the difficulty in attributing specific effects to broad based regulatory events.

This paper investigates why traders hide their orders and how other traders respond to hidden depth. Using a logit model, we provide empirical findings suggesting that traders use hidden orders to manage both exposure risk and picking off risk. Using probit models, we show that hidden depth increases order aggressiveness. Our interpretation of this empirical evidence is threefold. First, hidden depth detection is possible and frequent. Second, when traders detecthidden volume at the best opposite uote, they strategically adjust their order submission to seize the opportunity for depth improvement. Third, traders' response when hidden depth is detected suggests either that they do not associate hidden orders with informed trading or that the risk of trading with an informed trader is widely offset by the opportunity for depth improvement.

[I show that firms may optimally sell blocks of their own equity to other firms in anticipation of future corporate control activity. In the model, a target and one potential acquirer, who may also be an alliance partner, can negotiate before synergy values are learned. I find that equity implements an optimal mechanism, allowing the partners to extract surplus from outside bidders who may arrive later. The stake is limited by the outsiders' willingness to investigate. The results imply that corporate control may motivate an equity sale even when no takeover activity is apparent at the time or occurs ex post.]

I use microeconomic estimates of the effect of health on individual outcomes to construct macroeconomic estimates of the proximate effect of health on GDP per capita. I employ a variety of methods to construct estimates of the return to health, which I combine with cross-country and historical data on height, adult survival rates, and age at menarche. Using my preferred estimate, eliminating health differences among countries would reduce the variance of log GDP per worker by 9.9 percent and reduce the ratio of GDP per worker at the 90th percentile to GDP per worker at the lOth percentile from 20.5 to 17.9. While this effect is economically significant, it is also substantially smaller than estimates of the effect of health on economic growth that are derived from cross-country regressions.

Using a sample of 102 spinoffs in the period 1981 to 1997, we investigate the relation between corporate governance and the spinoff decision. Diversified firms conducting a spinoff have characteristics previously hypothesized to be associated with more effective corporate governance, such as greater ownership by outside board members, more heterogeneous boards, and fewer board members, in comparison to a set of peer firms. Post spinoff, relative valuation measures increase a significantly greater extent than for peer firms. These findings are consistent with the view that agency problems are a contributing factor in firms maintaining value destroying diversification strategies.

The corporate charters of a sample of Mexican firms show that private firms often significantly enhance the legal protection offered to investors, but public firms rarely do so. We construct a model that endogenizes the degree of investor protection that firms provide, using as a springboard the assumption that legal regimes differ in their ability to enforce precisely filtering contracts that provide protection only in those cases where expropriation can occur. Our model generates predictions about the types of contracts that would be employed and the levels of investor protection that would prevail across different legal regimes in both private and public firms.

This paper studies the influence of mass media on U. S. government response to approximately 5,000 natural disasters occurring between 1968 and 2002. These disasters took nearly 63,000 lives and affected 125 million people per year. We show that U. S. relief depends on whether the disaster occurs at the same time as other newsworthy events, such as the Olympic Games, which are obviously unrelated to need. We argue that the only plausible explanation of this is that relief decisions are driven by news coverage of disasters and that the other newsworthy material crowds out this news coverage.

Managers play earnings surprise games to avoid negative earnings surprises by managing earnings upward or by managing analysts' earnings expectations downward. We investigate the effectiveness of the financial reporting process at restraining earnings surprise games. Because the annual reporting process is subject to an independent audit and more rigorous expense recognition rules than interim reporting, it provides managers with fewer opportunities to manage earnings upward. We document that, relative to interim reporting, annual reporting reduces the likelihood of income‐increasing earnings management and, to a lesser extent, of negative surprise avoidance, but increases the magnitude of downward expectations management. Our findings suggest that regulatory attempts to monitor corporations' internal checks and balances are likely to be more effective at curbing upward earnings management than at mitigating negative surprise avoidance.

How much and how fast should we react to the threat of global warming? The Stern Review argues that the damages from climate change are large, and that nations should undertake sharp and immediate reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. An examination of the Review's radical revision of the economics of climate change finds, however, that it depends decisively on the assumption of a near-zero time discount rate combined with a specific utility function. The Review's unambiguous conclusions about the need for extreme immediate action will not survive the substitution of assumptions that are consistent with today's marketplace real interest rates and savings rates.

We assess dealer behavior in the specials market for US Treasury securities by comparing dealer participation in the Federal Reserve's securities loan auctions with prices in the private market. Dealer behavior is generally consistent with the law of one price and apparent violations can largely be explained by institutional differences between the private market and the Fed's program. However, for auctions that are effectively noncompetitive, dealers regularly pass up true arbitrage opportunities and frequently overpay to borrow securities. Dealers apparently do not realize that certain auctions are noncompetitive, even though the information needed to discern this fact is publicly available in advance.