This study examines common stock price adjustments to announcements of underwritten common stock offerings. On average, a negative stock price change is observed, which is larger for industrials than for public utilities. Combination primary-secondary stock offerings and dual stock-bond offerings exhibit similar negative announcement effects. Combination offerings involving decreases in management shareholdings exhibit significantly larger negative announcement effects. Cross-sectional analysis of stock announcement returns indicates a positive relationship to firms' leverage changes, and a negative relationship to prior stock returns and (for industrials) to decreases in management shareholdings.

This study examines the impact of competition on bid-ask spreads in the spot foreign exchange market. We measure competition primarily by the number of dealers active in the market and find that bid-ask spreads decrease with an increase in competition, even after controlling for the effects of volatility. The expected level of competition is time varying, highly predictable, and displays a strong seasonal component that in part is induced by geographic concentration of business activity over the 24-hour trading day. Our estimates show that the expected addition of one more competing dealer lowers the average quoted spread by 1.7%

We study how reputation incentives of influential independent directors (those holding multiple directorships) affect CEO compensation and firm financial reporting decisions. We find that CEO equity-based incentives, measured by CEO delta, vega and the number of equity grants are positively related to these directors' reputation incentives. These director reputation incentives also mitigate the perverse CEO incentives to inflate earnings, which arise from such high-powered compensation structures, by motivating increased board monitoring to limit discretionary accruals and real activity-based earnings management. These findings are invariant to endogeneity adjustments under multiple approaches, including exogenous changes in reputation incentives.

Ronald W. Masulis, Lakshmanan Shivakumar, Does Market Structure Affect the Immediacy of Stock Price Responses to News?, The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Vol. 37, No. 4 (Dec., 2002), pp. 617-648

Ronald W. Masulis, Brett Trueman, Corporate Investment and Dividend Decisions under Differential Personal Taxation, The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Vol. 23, No. 4 (Dec., 1988), pp. 369-385

We study reputation incentives in the director labor market and find that directors with multiple directorships distribute their effort unequally based on the directorship's relative prestige. When directors experience an exogenous increase in a directorship's relative ranking, their board attendance rate increases and subsequent firm performance improves. Also, directors are less willing to relinquish their relatively more prestigious directorships, even when firm performance declines. Finally, forced Chief Executive Officer departure sensitivity to poor performance rises when a larger fraction of independent directors view the board as relatively more prestigious. We conclude that director reputation is a powerful incentive for independent directors.

Flotation costs represent a significant loss of capital to firms and are positively related to information asymmetry between managers and outside investors. We measure a firm's information asymmetry by its accounting information quality based on two extensions of the Dechow and Dichev [2002. The quality of accruals and earnings: the role of accrual estimation errors. Accounting Review 77, 35–59] earnings accruals model, which is a more direct approach to assessing the information available to outside investors than the more commonly used proxies. Our main hypothesis is that poor accounting information quality raises uncertainty about a firm's financial condition for outside investors, though not necessarily for insiders. This accounting effect lowers demand for a firm's new equity, thereby raising underwriting costs and risk. Using a large sample of seasoned equity offerings (SEOs), we show that poor accounting information quality is associated with higher flotation costs in terms of larger underwriting fees, larger negative SEO announcement effects, and a higher probability of SEO withdrawals. These results are robust to joint determination of offer size and flotation cost components and to adjustments for sample selection bias.

In this paper a combined capital asset pricing model and option pricing model is considered and then applied to the derivation of equity's value and its systematic risk. In the first section we develop the two models and present some newly found properties of the option pricing model. The second section is concerned with the effects of these properties on the securityholders of firms with less than perfect ‘me first’ rules. We show how unanticipated changes in firm capital and asset structures can differentially affect the firm's debt and equity. In the final section of the paper we consider a number of theoretical and empirical implications of the joint model. These include investment policy as well as the causes and effects of non-stationarity in the systematic risk of levered equity and risky debt.

We use the 2003 NYSE and NASDAQ listing rules for board and committee independence as a quasinatural experiment to examine the causal relations between board structure and CEO monitoring. Noncompliant firms forced to raise board independence or adopt a fully independent nominating committee significantly increased their forced CEO turnover sensitivity to performance relative to compliant firms. Nominating committee independence is important even when firms had an independent board, and the effect is stronger when the CEO is on the committee. We conclude that greater board independence and full independence of nominating committees lead to more rigorous CEO monitoring and discipline.

We develop an analytical framework to explain firm's choice of equity flotation method and the near disappearance of rights offers by U.S. exchange-listed firms. The choice between uninsured rights, rights with standby underwriting, and firm-commitment underwriting depends on information asymmetries, shareholder characteristics, and direct flotation costs. Underwriter certification and current-shareholder takeup are viewed as substitute mechanisms for minimizing wealth transfers between shareholders and outside investors. Uninsured rights create adverse-selection effects when shareholder takeup is low. Implications for stock-price behavior around issue announcements, shareholder subscription precommitments, and relative issue frequencies are supported by large-sample evidence.