We analyze the impact of the press on the behavior of various economic agents by examining how media exposure of board ineffectiveness affects corporate governance, investor trading behavior, and security prices. Our focus on board quality is motivated by the strong media criticism to which corporate boards and corporate America, in general, have been recently subjected. The results indicate that media releases of (noisy) information have significant economic consequences. In particular, media exposure of board ineffectiveness forces the targeted agents to take corrective actions and enhances shareholder wealth. Individual investors appear to react negatively to the media exposure, whereas investment firms act as if they anticipate the targeted firms’ corrective actions.

This paper examines time-series patterns of external financing decisions and shows that publicly traded U.S. firms fund a much larger proportion of their financing deficit with external equity when the cost of equity capital is low. The historical values of the cost of equity capital have long-lasting effects on firms’ capital structures through their influence on firms’ historical financing decisions. We also introduce a new econometric technique to deal with biases in estimates of the speed of adjustment toward target leverage. We find that firms adjust toward target leverage at a moderate speed, with a half-life of 3.7 years for book leverage, even after controlling for the traditional determinants of capital structure and firm fixed effects.

We investigate the (sell-side) analyst rankings of Institutional Investor (I/I) and The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), using data from 1993–2005. We find that factors with a primary component of recognition are the most important determinants of the rankings, although performance measures are statistically significant determinants in some cases. The single exception to this finding is with existing WSJ stars, where industry-adjusted investment-recommendation performance is the only significant determinant of repeating as a star. Further, in the year after becoming stars, the recommendations of WSJ stars are significantly worse than those of nonstars; and the recommendations and earnings forecasts of I/I stars, as well as the earnings forecasts of WSJ stars, are not significantly different from those of nonstars. We conclude that these rankings are largely “popularity contests.”

We examine two hypotheses to explain stock mispricing: i) the money illusion hypothesis (Modigliani and Cohn (1979)) and ii) the resale option hypothesis (Scheinkman and Xiong (2003)). We find that the money illusion hypothesis may explain the level, but not the volatility, of mispricing in the U.S. market. In contrast, the stock resale option hypothesis, which stems from heterogeneous beliefs about future dividend growth rates and short-sale constraints, can explain both the level and the volatility of mispricing. The evidence suggests that while the two hypotheses complement each other in explaining the level of mispricing, the resale option hypothesis provides a more coherent explanation for asset price bubbles, in which extraordinarily high price levels are often accompanied by excessive volatility and frenzied trading.