This study extends the Grullon, Michaely, and Swaminathan (2002) analysis by incorporating default risk. Using data for firms that either increased or initiated cash dividend payments during the 23-year period 1986–2008, we find reduction in default risk. This reduction is shown to be a priced risk factor beyond the Fama and French (1993) risk measures, and it explains the dividend payment decision and the positive market reaction around dividend increases and initiations. Further analysis reveals that the reduction in default risk is a significant factor in explaining the 3-year excess returns following dividend increases and initiations.

Following the SRO rulings' requirement that analysts announce coverage terminations including either their final rating or the reason for the termination, we find 86.7 % of the voluntary terminations being attributed to ‘resources’ reallocation’ and only 13.3 % to firm poor outlook. Developing a classification algorithm to split the reallocation terminations into performance-based terminations (those driven by the dropped firm's poor outlook) and resource-constrained terminations (those unrelated to firm performance), we show that although the market's reaction to the termination announcement does not differ between the two sub-samples, future returns and financial performance of the performance-based sample significantly underperform those of the resource-constrained sample. We perform a number of additional analyses, including the use of terminations explicitly attributed to firm bleak output, to ex ante differentiate between the two types of reallocation terminations. We conclude that analysts withhold unfavorable news through the provision of news-neutral reasonings, in contrast to the regulators' intentions.

In this study we use the SEC's decision to eliminate the reconciliation requirement for cross-listed companies to examine whether this loss of information prompted financial analysts to provide more informative research reports. We first document that the informativeness of analyst earnings forecasts increased, on average, in the post-regulation period for the sample of firms that stopped providing the reconciliation information (regulated firms). We next relate this change in informativeness to stock liquidity, a common proxy for information asymmetry. We do not find any change in market liquidity for regulated firms with greater analyst informativeness in the post-regulation period. In contrast, we document a decrease in market liquidity for regulated firms with lower analyst informativeness. These results support the conjecture that, when analysts compensate for the loss of information, the firm's information environment is not affected. We conclude that analysts can play an important role in capital markets as information providers and that their research can be especially valuable in times of information shortage.

We examine the empirical properties of the theoretical Black–Scholes–Merton (BSM) bankruptcy model. We evaluate the predictive ability of various existing modifications of the BSM model and extend prior studies by estimating volatility directly from market-observable returns on firm value. We show that parsimonious models using our direct market-observable volatility estimate perform better than alternative, more sophisticated, models. Our findings suggest the adoption of simpler modelling approaches relying on market data when implementing the BSM model.