We provide evidence of two variants of a dating game that entails picking a grant date ex post, that is, after the board's compensation decision is made: back-dating (picking a date before the board decision date), and forward-dating (waiting after the board decision date to observe the stock price behavior). Consistent with back-dating, we find stock return behavior around the grant date to be positively related to reporting lag. In the promptly reported sample, we find stock return behavior and the pattern of reporting lags consistent with forward-dating. Our calculations show that managers can obtain economically significant benefits by playing the dating game. , Oxford University Press.

Merton [1987. A simple model of capital market equilibrium with incomplete information. Journal of Finance 42, 483–510] shows that stocks about which not all investors are informed should yield a return premium. This premium depends on the shadow cost of incomplete information which in turn depends on the shareholder base, relative market size, and idiosyncratic risk. Utilizing a comprehensive database of Swedish shareholdings, we demonstrate that stock returns are positively related to the shadow cost. We also find that the shareholder base is negatively related to returns when controlling for size and idiosyncratic risk. Zero-cost portfolios based on the shadow cost/shareholder base yield substantial trading profits that are never positively correlated with the market and are only modestly explained by the four-factor model.

This paper studies collective-action games in which the production of a public good requires teamwork. A leading example is a threshold game in which provision requires the voluntary participation of m out of n players. Quantal-response strategy revisions allow play to move between equilibria in which a team successfully provides, and an equilibrium in which the collective action fails. A full characterization of long-run play reveals the determinants of success; these include the correlation between players' costs of provision and their valuations for the good. The addition of an extra "bad apple" player can "spoil the barrel" by destabilizing successful teams and so offers a rationale for limiting the pool of possible contributors.

We develop a model of corporate dividend policy based on the idea that management values operating flexibility. By reducing dividends and conserving cash, management increases its flexibility. This improves its ability to invest in projects that it believes are good for the shareholders in the long run but which shareholders would not provide the capital for because they think the projects are value reducing. However, the cost of not paying dividends is a reduction in the current stock price. Management trades off these two aspects of dividends. Flexibility considerations help us understand various dimensions of dividend policy that existing theories do not explain. Our theory generates numerous testable predictions that we confront with the data. The evidence is supportive of the model.

This paper considers the profit‐maximization problem of a firm that must make sunk investments in long‐lived assets to produce output. It is shown that if per‐period accounting income is calculated using a simple and natural allocation rule for investment, called the relative replacement cost (RRC) rule, under a broad range of plausible circumstances, the firm can choose the fully optimal sequence of investments over time simply by choosing a level of investment each period in order to maximize the next period’s accounting income. Furthermore, in a model in which shareholders delegate the investment decision to a better‐informed manager, it is shown that if accounting income based on the RRC allocation rule is used as a performance measure for the manager, robust incentives are created for the manager to choose the profit‐maximizing sequence of investments, regardless of the manager’s own personal discount rate or other aspects of the manager’s personal preferences.

This paper reexamines the validity of the expectation hypothesis (EH) of the term structure of US repo rates ranging in maturity from overnight to 3 months. We extend the work of Longstaff [2000b. The term structure of very short term rates: new evidence for the expectations hypothesis. Journal of Financial Economics 58, 397–415] in two directions: (1) we implement statistical tests designed to increase test power in this context; (2) more important, we assess the economic value of departures from the EH based on criteria of profitability and economic significance in the context of a simple trading strategy. The EH is rejected throughout the term structure examined on the basis of the statistical tests. However, the results of our economic analysis are favorable to the EH, suggesting that the statistical rejections of the EH in the repo market are economically insignificant.

We find evidence that conflicts of interest arising from mergers and acquisitions (M&A) relations influence analysts' recommendations, corroborating regulators' and practitioners' suspicions in a setting, i.e., M&A relations, not previously examined in research on analyst conflicts. In addition, the M&A context allows us to disentangle the conflict of interest effect from selection bias. We find that analysts affiliated with acquirer advisors upgrade acquirer stocks around M&A deals, even around all-cash deals, in which selection bias is unlikely. Also consistent with conflict of interest but not selection bias, target-affiliated analysts publish optimistic reports about acquirers after, but not before, the exchange ratio of an all-stock deal is set.

We test whether capital account liberalization led to higher economic growth using de jure measures of capital account and financial current account openness for 94 nations, from 1950 (or independence) onward. We argue that measurement error, differing time periods used, and collinearity among independent variables account for conflicting results in prior scholarship. We use pooled time-series, cross-sectional OLS and system GMM estimators to examine economic growth rates, 1955–2004. Capital account liberalization had a positive association with growth in both developed and emerging market nations. We confirm that equity market liberalization has an independent effect on economic growth.

We show that if true returns are independently distributed and a manager fully reports gains but delays reporting losses, then reported returns will feature conditional serial correlation. We use conditional serial correlation as a measure of conditional return smoothing. We estimate conditional serial correlation in a large sample of hedge funds. We find that the probability of observing conditional serial correlation is related to the volatility and magnitude of investor cash flows, consistent with conditional return smoothing in response to the risk of capital flight. We also present evidence that conditional serial correlation is a leading indicator of fraud.