Using hedge funds’ holdings of IPO stocks, we find that stocks with abnormally high hedge fund holdings, based on stock and deal characteristics, yield abnormal returns. Moreover, hedge funds are able to sell IPO stocks in a timely fashion before long-run underperforming periods start, suggesting that hedge funds possess information advantages in IPO stocks. Finally, we address the question of where hedge funds may have obtained their information advantages. Hedge funds earn higher abnormal returns in “connected” stocks when their prime brokers also serve as IPO underwriters, indicating that such connections enable hedge funds to make more informed investment decisions in IPO stocks. Received December 31, 2014; editorial decision May 27, 2017 by Editor Wayne Ferson.

Extensive empirical research concerning the impact of taxes on corporate decisions has had trouble identifying seemingly obvious effects. Perhaps the problem is that the seemingly obvious tax predictions are not quite right. We provide an equilibrium model with both corporate and personal taxes. In the steady-state equilibrium, the corporate tax rate affects the level of production despite interest deductibility at the firm level, but not household-level taxes on interest earnings or dividends. We prove several other tax irrelevance results and document a Laffer curve in the corporate tax rate.

[Previous studies document that the stock returns of bond-issuing firms significantly underperform matched peers over the three to five years following issuance. We revisit this phenomenon and show that the underperformance is the result of an omitted return factor (a "bad model problem"). Debt issuers have significantly higher stock market liquidity than size and book-to-market matched counterparts, and differences in liquidity are largest for the worst-performing groups of issuers. When we additionally match on liquidity or when we include a liquidity factor in the model for expected returns, the evidence of underperformance disappears.]

We develop a theory of market crashes based on differences of opinion among investors. Because of short-sales constraints, bearish investors do not initially participate in the market and their information is not revealed in prices. However, if other previously bullish investors bail out of the market, the originally bearish group may become the marginal "support buyers," and more will be learned about their signals. Thus accumulated hidden information comes out during market declines. The model explains a variety of stylized facts about crashes and also makes a distinctive new prediction—that returns will be more negatively skewed conditional on high trading volume.

This paper studies the effect of risk-taking incentives provided by option compensation on corporate debt maturity choices. The Financial Accounting Standard (FAS) 123R is used as a quasi-natural experiment to establish causality. FAS 123R requires firms to expense stock options at fair value, which has resulted in a dramatic reduction in option compensation and managerial risk-taking incentives. We find that treated firms significantly increased debt maturity relative to control firms. Further tests identify that the alleviation of creditor-shareholder agency conflicts due to the adoption of FAS 123R is the underlying mechanism driving the result.

In many scenarios such as banking and liquidity crises, inefficiencies often arise because investors face uncertainties about economic fundamentals and the strategies of other investors. How information affects fundamental uncertainty is well studied, but how information affects strategic uncertainty is underexplored. This paper examines how two communication mechanisms, market and cheap talk, affect investment decisions and efficiency in an experimental investment game with both fundamental and strategic uncertainty. I find that the market does not improve coordination because the expectation that coordination failures will occur is self‐fulfilling, while cheap talk improves coordination because the signals of willingness to invest alleviate strategic uncertainty.

We study the behavior of a financial institution subject to capital requirements based on self-reported VaR measures, as in the Basel Committee's Internal Models Approach. We view these capital requirements and the associated backtesting procedure as a mechanism designed to induce financial institutions to reveal the risk of their investments and to support this risk with adequate levels of capital. Accordingly, we consider the simultaneous choice of an optimal dynamic reporting and investment strategy. Overall, we find that VaR-based capital requirements can be very effective not only in curbing portfolio risk but also in inducing revelation of this risk.

Managements (“insiders”) of many corporations, especially small or newly-public firms, invest considerable resources in investor relations. We develop a model to explore the incentives of insiders to undertake such costly investments. We point out that insiders may undertake such investments not necessarily to improve the share price, but to enhance the liquidity of their block of shares. This leads to a divergence of interest between insiders and dispersed outside shareholders regarding investor relations. Our model predicts that the demographics of insiders (e.g. liquidity needs, size of equity stakes) are important determinants of the extent of investor relations across firms.

I describe a brief summary of the development of databases used in accounting research and discuss the research questions addressed in traditional databases and ‘new’ databases. The new data include online searches such as Google Trends data; textual data from corporate disclosures, analyst reports, conference call transcripts, earnings press releases, and news media articles; social network and social media data from Twitter, LinkedIn, Glassdoor, and other data. New data holds promise for research on attention or cognitive processing constraints; on tone/valence, affect, deceptiveness and credibility for capital market and financial reporting outcomes. I examine the econometric challenges of new data and suggest the potential for new data to offer new auditing tools to detect poor financial reporting, which will help to discourage earnings management.