Tax professionals are responsible for objectively evaluating tax authorities and evidence relevant to their application and for serving as client advocates. We predict that practice risk — that is, exposure to monetary and nonmonetary costs of making inappropriate recommendations — will affect tax professionals' ability to meet these responsibilities by influencing the manner in which they process information about a tax situation as well as their resulting recommendations for clients. We conduct an experiment in which we manipulate practice risk through client characteristics. We also manipulate provision and nature of outcome information. We find that tax professionals process information differently for clients of different risk levels. Specifically, tax professionals weight negative outcome information more heavily when forming likelihood assessments underlying recommendations for a high‐risk client, relative to a low‐risk client. Further, risk directly affects recommendations in that tax professionals more strongly recommend an aggressive position for a low‐risk client. Differential processing of information for clients with identical transactions but different risk levels may protect the tax professional from the higher expected costs of making inappropriate recommendations to high‐risk clients. However, it indicates that tax professionals do not evaluate evidence objectively for all types of clients.

Journal Article The Impact of Debt Financing on Entry and Exit in a Duopoly Get access Bart M. Lambrecht Bart M. Lambrecht University of Cambridge Address correspondence to Bart Lambrecht, Judge Institute of Management Studies, Cambridge CB2 1AG, UK, or e-mail: [email protected]. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of Financial Studies, Volume 14, Issue 3, 1 July 2001, Pages 765–804, https://doi.org/10.1093/rfs/14.3.765 Published: 22 June 2015

This study surveys the literature examining the privatization of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) We review the history of privatization, the theoretical and empirical evidence on the relative performance of state owned and privately owned firms, the types of privatization, if and by how much privatization has improved the performance of former SOEs in non-transition and transition countries, how investors in privatizations have fared, and the impact of privatization on the development of capital markets and corporate governance. In most settings privatization “works” in that the firms become more efficient, more profitable, and financially healthier, and reward investors.

Financial economists for the past two decades have attempted to explain why the equity premium is so high, now known as the equity premium puzzle (EPP). We model investor heterogeneity, market segmentation and optimal leverage, using the time separable standard power utility, market completeness and ignoring transaction costs to explain the EPP. We explain both the EPP and the related risk-free rate puzzle without resorting to preference modification. Furthermore, we show a unique interior equilibrium for the debt ratio, contrary to the work by F. Modigliani, M.H. Miller (The cost of capital, corporation finance and the theory of investment, American Economic Review 48 (1958) 261–297; Corporate income taxes and the cost of capital, American Economic Review 53 (1963), 433–443) and S.C. Myers (Presidential address: The capital structure puzzle, Journal of Finance 39 (1984), 575–592). Our simulations show the relevance of our models.

We analyse a market where (i) trade proceeds by random and anonymous pairwise meetings with bargaining; (ii) agents are asymmetrically informed about the value of the traded good; and (iii) no new entrants are allowed once the market is open. We show that information revelation and efficiency never obtain in equilibrium, even as discounting is removed. This holds whether the asymmetry is two-sided or one-sided. In some cases there exist equilibria where a substantial amount goes untraded. This contrasts with the earlier literature, which was based on the steadystate equilibria of a model where agents enter the market every period.

In this study, we propose an alternative technique for estimating the cost of equity capital. Specifically, we use a discounted residual income model to generate a market implied cost‐of‐capital. We then examine firm characteristics that are systematically related to this estimate of cost‐of‐capital. We show that a firm's implied cost‐of‐capital is a function of its industry membership, B/M ratio, forecasted long‐term growth rate, and the dispersion in analyst earnings forecasts. Together, these variables explain around 60% of the cross‐sectional variation in future (two‐year‐ahead) implied costs‐of‐capital. The stability of these long‐term relations suggests they can be exploited to estimate future costs‐of‐capital. We discuss the implications of these findings for capital budgeting, investment decisions, and valuation research.

Early studies find that option introductions tend to raise the price of underlying stocks. More recent research indicates that post-1980 option introductions are associated with negative abnormal returns in underlying stocks. Other studies document increased short sale activities following option listing. This paper provides evidence that the documented abnormal returns and changes in short interest around option listings are consistent with the mitigation of short sale constraints resulting from the option introduction, and that both the abnormal returns and short interest changes around listing dates can be predicted using ex ante characteristics of the underlying stock.

This study investigates whether the ability of book‐to‐market to predict returns derives from systematic errors in the market’s expectation of future earnings. We extend Beaver and Ryan (1996, 2000) by decomposing book‐to‐market into a more persistent (bias) component and a delayed recognition (lag) component. We find that both components are related to analyst expectations of future earnings, but the lag component is the dominant factor across all forecast horizons. Similarly, we find that the lag component explains most of the inverse relation between book‐to‐market and future returns. Given that lag is constructed by regressing book‐to‐market ratios on lagged price changes, our results are consistent with the lag component capturing systematic stock price reversals. We find that the components have unique relations with subsequent earnings forecast revisions, and controlling for these relations substantially mitigates the components’ ability to predict returns. Our component‐level analysis provides insight into how expected future earnings, summarized in book‐to‐market ratios help to explain this market anomaly.

This paper develops and tests procedures for ranking the performance of security analysts based on the timeliness of their earnings forecasts, the abnormal trading volume associated with these forecasts, and forecast accuracy. Our framework provides an objective assessment of analyst quality that differs from the standard approach, which uses survey evidence to rate analysts. We find that lead analysts identified by our measure of forecast timeliness have a greater impact on stock prices than follower analysts. Further, we find that performance rankings based on forecast timeliness are more informative than rankings based on abnormal trading volume and forecast accuracy. We also present evidence that analyst's forecast revisions are correlated with recent stock price performance, suggesting that security analysts use publicly available information to revise their earnings forecasts.

American IPOs are priced after a process of bookbuilding, during which issuers can withdraw at any time. We hypothesize that the option to withdraw reduces underpricing by strengthening the issuers’ bargaining power with respect to investors. Empirical analysis reveals that underpricing is lower when investor perception of an IPO's likelihood of withdrawal is higher. Withdrawing issuers are neither smaller nor less profitable than issuers completing their IPOs, and engage underwriters that are as reputable as those managing completed offerings. Withdrawal is correlated with leverage, intended use of proceeds, expected issue size, venture backing, revenues, NASDAQ returns, and IPO activity.