The combination of rising home prices, declining interest rates, and near-frictionless refinancing opportunities can create unintentional synchronization of homeowner leverage, leading to a “ratchet” effect on leverage because homes are indivisible and owner-occupants cannot raise equity to reduce leverage when home prices fall. Our simulation of the U.S. housing market yields potential losses of 1.7 trillion from June 2006 to December 2008 with cash-out refinancing vs. only 330 billion in the absence of cash-out refinancing. The refinancing ratchet effect is a new type of systemic risk in the financial system and does not rely on any dysfunctional behaviors.

In a large panel of Compustat firms, we find that firm policy changes after exogenous CEO departures do not display abnormally high levels of variability, casting doubt on the presence of idiosyncratic-style effects in policy choices. After endogenous CEO departures, we do detect abnormally large policy changes. These changes are larger when the firm is likely to draw from a deeper pool of replacement CEO candidates, suggesting the presence of causal-style effects that are anticipated by the board. Our evidence suggests that managerial styles are not transferred across employers and that standard F-tests are inappropriate for identifying style effects.

This paper analyses the effect immigration has on the wages of native workers. Unlike most previous work, we estimate wage effects along the distribution of native wages. We derive a flexible empirical strategy that does not rely on pre-allocating immigrants to particular skill groups. In our empirical analysis, we demonstrate that immigrants downgrade considerably upon arrival. As for the effects on native wages, we find a pattern of effects whereby immigration depresses wages below the 20th percentile of the wage distribution but leads to slight wage increases in the upper part of the wage distribution. This pattern mirrors the evidence on the location of immigrants in the wage distribution. We suggest that possible explanations for the overall slightly positive effect on native wages, besides standard immigration surplus arguments, could involve deviations of immigrant remuneration from contribution to production either because of initial mismatch or immigrant downgrading.

Abstract We test the implications of anchoring bias associated with forecast earnings per share (FEPS) for forecast errors, earnings surprises, stock returns, and stock splits. We find that analysts make optimistic (pessimistic) forecasts when a firm’s FEPS is lower (higher) than the industry median. Further, firms with FEPS greater (lower) than the industry median experience abnormally high (low) future stock returns, particularly around subsequent earnings announcement dates. These firms are also more likely to engage in stock splits. Finally, split firms experience more positive forecast revisions, more negative forecast errors, and more negative earnings surprises after stock splits.

Abstract A number of studies of U.S. stock returns document what is referred to as the investment or asset growth effect. Specifically, firms that increase investment or total assets subsequently earn lower risk-adjusted returns. This study finds substantial cross-country differences in the asset growth effect. In particular, the asset growth effect is stronger in countries with more developed financial markets, but it does not seem to be associated with corporate governance or the costs of trading. Overall, the evidence is consistent with a q-theory where financial market development captures either managers’ willingness or ability to align investment expenditures to the cost of capital, but it is inconsistent with the hypothesis that the asset growth effect is due to bad governance and overinvestment.

Abstract We examine the impact of influenza on stock markets. For the United States, a higher incidence of flu is associated with decreased trading, decreased volatility, decreased returns, and higher bid-ask spreads. Consistent with the flu affecting institutional investors and market makers, the decrease in trading activity and volatility is primarily driven by the incidence of influenza in the greater New York City area. However, the effect of the flu on bid-ask spreads and returns is related to the incidence of flu nationally. International data confirm our findings of a decrease in trading activity and returns when flu incidence is high.

This paper proposes two new estimators for determining the number of factors (r) in static approximate factor models. We exploit the well-known fact that the r largest eigenvalues of the variance matrix of N response variables grow unboundedly as N increases, while the other eigenvalues remain bounded. The new estimators are obtained simply by maximizing the ratio of two adjacent eigenvalues. Our simulation results provide promising evidence for the two estimators.

We examine how Chief Executive Officer (CEO) compensation increased at a subset of firms in response to a governance shock that affected compensation levels at other firms in the economy. We first show that Delaware-incorporated firms with staggered boards and no outside blockholders increased CEO compensation following the mid-1990s Delaware legal cases that strengthened their ability to resist hostile takeovers. Consistent with the Gabaix and Landier (2008) contagion hypothesis, non-Delaware firms subsequently increased CEO compensation when the rulings affected a substantial number of firms in their industries. We further show how these legal developments contributed significantly to the rapid increase in CEO compensation in the late 1990s.

ABSTRACT We investigate whether management's decision regarding the recognition of the valuation allowance (VA) for deferred tax assets provides incremental information about the persistence of accounting losses. We introduce a classification scheme that assigns loss firm‐years into three categories based on whether management appears to have recognized a material change in the VA, and whether or not the firm has positive taxable income (e.g., a net operating loss). The results of our study show that our tax categories contain information about the persistence of accounting losses over the following three years beyond variables previously identified to predict loss persistence. This incremental information is consistent with management using private information about the firm's future prospects in setting the VA. Finally, we find that investors’ pricing of the VA varies with the saliency of the tax signal and the information environment of the firm.

ABSTRACT This study empirically examines whether deferred taxes provide incremental information about future tax payments and explores whether the relationship is affected by whether and when the deferred tax accounts reverse. The analysis provides evidence that while deferred taxes do provide incremental information about future tax payments, the magnitude of the information is small. Further, consistent with theoretical predictions (Guenther and Sansing 2000, 2004; Dotan 2003) the analysis demonstrates there is an asymmetrical association between deferred taxes and future tax payments. For instance, deferred taxes associated with temporary differences that are included in GAAP income prior to taxable income are associated with future tax payments. In contrast, deferred taxes associated with temporary differences that are included in GAAP income after taxable income are not associated with future tax payments. Finally, the analysis provides evidence that growth in the deferred tax balances does not defer future tax payments. Data Availability: The data are available from public sources.