Hedge funds using Lehman as prime broker faced a decline in funding liquidity after the September 15, 2008 bankruptcy. We find that stocks held by these Lehman-connected funds experienced greater declines in market liquidity following the bankruptcy than other stocks; the effect was larger for ex ante illiquid stocks and persisted into the beginning of 2009. We find no similar effects surrounding the Bear Stearns failure, suggesting that disruptions surrounding bankruptcy explain the liquidity effects. We conclude that shocks to traders' funding liquidity reduce the market liquidity of the assets that they trade.

Mortgage loans are leading examples of transactions where experts on one side of the market take advantage of consumers' lack of knowledge and experience. We study the compensation that borrowers pay to mortgage brokers for assistance from application to closing. Two findings support the conclusion that confused borrowers overpay for brokers' services: (i) A model of effective shopping shows that borrowers sacrifice at least $1,000 by shopping from too few brokers. (ii) Borrowers who compensate their brokers with both cash and a commission from the lender pay twice as much as similar borrowers who pay no cash.

We investigate whether firms’ corporate social performance (CSP) ratings impact their performance (cost of capital) and risk. Using a proprietary CSP ratings database, we find no difference in the risk-adjusted performance of UK firms with high and low CSP ratings. Additionally, the firms do not differ in their amount of idiosyncratic risk. We find some evidence of high-ranked firms being larger. The empirical evidence therefore indicates that investors and managers are able to implement a CSP investment or business strategy without incurring any significant financial cost (or benefit) in terms of risk or return.

We examine the structure of communications in accounting research by analyzing patterns of citations among authors who have published in five major journals between 1984 and 2008. Understanding communication structures is important because they shape academic knowledge creation, which prominent scholars have claimed has become narrowly focused and self-perpetuating in accounting due to a specific type of communication structure - 'tribalism.' We use a mathematical algorithm and other analyses to distinguish among five types of communication structures. We find that the field contains multiple clusters, with some clusters being centered on research topics alone, a finding consistent with a 'normal academic field.' Remaining clusters are more narrowly based – on combinations of topics, methods and theory bases – and all but one of them represent a “small world” structure because they are close together and exhibit frequent communication. Both normal academic fields and small worlds have been shown to contribute positively to innovation in research. The economics-based archival financial accounting cluster exhibits some properties of a tribal structure because, while researchers in other clusters communicate toward this cluster, the cluster sends most of its outbound communication to itself. A contribution of our study is that it shows that tribalism is not as rampant as previously suggested. Also, our findings suggest the field has become less tribal over time. Further, we identify 'hub' researchers who attract communications from multiple clusters and whose articles build on, and cite, work from multiple clusters. These individuals are instrumental in moving fields away from tribalism. Finally, we discuss possible determinants and consequences of the existing communication structure.

Model selection (i.e., the choice of an asset pricing model to the exclusion of competing models) is an inherently misguided strategy when the true model is unavailable to the researcher. This paper illustrates the advantages of a model pooling approach in characterizing the cross section of stock returns. The optimal pool combines models using the log predictive score criterion, a measure of the out-of-sample performance of each model, and consistently outperforms the best individual model. The benefits to model pooling are most pronounced during periods of economic stress, and it is a valuable tool for asset allocation decisions.

We study efficient non-linear taxation of labour and capital in a dynamic Mirrleesian model incorporating political economy constraints. Policies are chosen sequentially over time, without commitment. Our main result is that the marginal tax on capital income is progressive, in the sense that richer agents face higher marginal tax rates.

This study examines whether application of IFRS by non-US firms results in accounting amounts comparable to those resulting from application of US GAAP by US firms. IFRS firms have greater accounting system and value relevance comparability with US firms when IFRS firms apply IFRS than when they applied domestic standards. Comparability is greater for firms that adopt IFRS mandatorily, firms in common law and high enforcement countries, and in more recent years. Earnings smoothing, accrual quality, and timeliness are potential sources of the greater comparability. Although application of IFRS has enhanced financial reporting comparability with US firms, significant differences remain.

This paper compares the dividend policy of owner-controlled firms with that of firms where the owners are a minority relative to non-owner employees, customers, and community citizens. We find that regardless of whether owners or non-owners control the firm, the strong stakeholder uses the dividend payout decision to mitigate rather than to intensify the conflict of interest with the weak stakeholder. Hence, the higher the potential agency cost as reflected in the firm’s stakeholder structure, the more the actual agency cost is reduced by the strong stakeholder’s dividend payout decision. These findings are consistent with a dividend policy in which opportunistic power abuse in stakeholder conflicts is discouraged by costly consequences for the abuser at a later stage. Indirect evidence supports this interpretation.

What is the best way to reward innovation? While prizes avoid deadweight loss, intellectual property (IP) selects high social surplus projects. Optimal innovation policy thus trades off the ex ante screening benefit and the ex post distortion. It solves a multidimensional screening problem in the private information held by the innovator: research cost, quality, and market size of the innovation. The appropriate degree of market power is never full monopoly pricing and is determined by measurable market characteristics, the inequality and elasticity of innovation supply, making the analysis open to empirical calibration. The framework has applications beyond IP policy to the optimal pricing of platforms or the optimal procurement of public infrastructure.