The existing empirical literature fails to agree on the nature of the intertemporal relation between risk and return. This paper attempts to resolve the issue by estimating a conditional two‐factor model motivated by Merton's intertemporal capital asset pricing model. When long‐term government bond returns are included as a second factor, the partial relation between the market risk premium and conditional market variance is found to be positive and significant. The paper also helps explain the convoluted empirical relation between the market risk premium, conditional market variance, and the nominal risk‐free rate previously reported in the literature.

Several studies hypothesize a relation between board size and financial performance. Empirical tests of the relation exist in only a few studies of large U.S. firms. We find a significant negative correlation between board size and profitability in a sample of small and midsize Finnish firms. Finding a board-size effect for a new and different class of firms affects the range of explanations for the board-size effect.

We present evidence that insured deposit financing shields banks from the full costs of market discipline. Moody's downgrades, indicators of increasing risk, are associated with negative abnormal equity returns that are increasing in the bank's reliance on insured deposits. Moreover, banks raise their use of insured deposits following increases in risk. These findings cast doubt on the ability of capital market participants to effectively discipline bank behavior within the current regulatory environment. More generally, our findings highlight the potential for regulation to undermine market discipline in regulated industries.

Daily data from interdealer government bond brokers are examined for tax and liquidity effects. We use two approaches to create cash flow matching portfolios of similar securities and look for pricing discrepancies associated with liquidity or tax effects. We also look for the presence of tax and liquidity effects by including a liquidity term when fitting a cubic spline to the after‐tax yield curve. We find evidence of tax timing options and liquidity effects. However, the effects are much smaller than previously reported and the effects of liquidity are primarily due to high volume bonds with long maturities.

This study investigates the relationship between insider trading and fraud. We find that in the presence of fraud, insiders reduce their holdings of company stock through high levels of selling activity as measured by either the number of transactions, the number of shares sold, or the dollar amount of shares sold. Moreover, we present evidence that a cascaded logit model, incorporating insider trading variables and firm-specific financial characteristics, differentiates companies with fraud from companies without fraud.

This study evaluates the relation between security returns and funds-based earnings components. We document that proxies for market expectations of the components that are based on measures of historical serial- and cross-dependencies are substantially more accurate than random-walk proxies. Moreover, we detect significantly higher valuations of the operating cash flow component of earnings, relative to current accruals, when market expectations are represented using the dependency-based predictions. Such differential valuation is not detectable for random-walk representations. Contrary to results in Ali (1994), we find incremental information in unexpected cash flows over the whole spectrum (moderate and extreme) of unexpected cash flow realizations.

Issuers of initial public offerings (IPOs) can report earnings in excess of cash flows by taking positive accruals. This paper provides evidence that issuers with unusually high accruals in the IPO year experience poor stock return performance in the three years thereafter. IPO issuers in the most “aggressive” quartile of earnings managers have a three‐year aftermarket stock return of approximately 20 percent less than IPO issuers in the most “conservative” quartile. They also issue about 20 percent fewer seasoned equity offerings. These differences are statistically and economically significant in a variety of specifications.