Little is known about the timing and execution of open market repurchases. U.S. firms are under no obligation to disclose when they are trading, and generally report only quarterly changes in shares outstanding. We use 64 firms' supplementally disclosed repurchase trading data to provide the first examination of repurchase timing and execution. Across the days reported in our sample, firms adopted a variety of execution styles ranging from immediate intense repurchasing to delayed and smoothed repurchasing. We find no clear evidence that repurchases are timed to coincide with, precede, or follow, days on which information is released. We benchmark the costs and value of a given repurchase program against naive accumulation strategies achieving the same terminal portfolio. While there is considerable variation across the firms, NYSE firms on average beat their benchmarks, whereas NASDAQ firms do not. Finally, we document the liquidity impact of open market repurchases. We find that repurchasing contributes to market liquidity by narrowing bid-ask spreads and attenuating the price impact of order imbalances on days when repurchase trades are completed.

Using a confidential version of the NLSY79, we estimate large effects of neighborhood social characteristics and job proximity on labor market activity. A variety of neighborhood social characteristics are associated with less market work. Social characteristics have nonlinear effects, with the greatest impact in the worst neighborhoods. Social characteristics are also more important for less‐educated workers. Exploiting the panel aspects of our data, we find that estimates that do not account for neighborhood selection on the basis of time‐invariant and time‐varying unobserved individual characteristics substantially overstate the social effects of neighborhoods but understate the effects of job access.

The consistency of positive past returns and tax-loss selling significantly affects the relation between past returns and the cross-section of expected returns. Analysis of these additional effects across stock characteristics, seasons, and tax regimes provides clues about the sources of temporal relations in stock returns, pointing to potential explanations for this relation. A parsimonious trading rule generates surprisingly large economic returns despite controls for confounding sources of return premia, microstructure effects, and data snooping biases.

Using a cross section of effectively the entire universe of overseas listings across world markets, we examine the market preferences of firms listing their stock abroad. We find that geographic, economic, cultural, and industrial proximity play the dominant role in the choice of overseas listing venue. Contrary to the notion that firms maximize international portfolio diversification gains in listing abroad, cross-listing activity is more common across markets for which diversification gains are relatively low. Our findings imply that the same proximity constraints that are believed to lead to “home bias” in investment portfolio decisions also exert a profound influence on financing decisions.

We analyze a unique data set and uncover a remarkable result that casts a new light on the home bias phenomenon. The data are comprehensive, security-level holdings of emerging market equities by U.S. investors. We document that at a point in time U.S. portfolios are tilted towards firms that are large, have fewer restrictions on foreign ownership, or are cross-listed on a U.S. exchange. The size of the cross-listing effect is striking. In contrast to the well-documented under-weighting of foreign stocks, emerging market equities that are cross-listed on a U.S. exchange are incorporated into U.S. portfolios at full international CAPM weights. Our results suggest that information asymmetries play an important role in equity home bias and that the benefits of international risk sharing are limited to select firms.

We provide evidence on the impact of tax incentives and financial constraints on corporate R&D expenditure decisions. We contribute to extant research by comparing R&D expenditures in the United States and Canada, thereby exploiting the differences in the two countries' R&D tax credit mechanisms and generally accepted accounting principles. The two tax incentive mechanism designs are consistent with differing views of the degree of financial constraints faced by firms in these economies. Our sample also allows us to explore the effects of capitalizing R&D on Canadian firms. Employing a matched design, we document relations between tax credit incentives and R&D spending consistent with both Canadian and U.S. public companies responding as though they are not financially constrained. We estimate that the Canadian credit system induces, on average, $1.30 of additional R&D spending per dollar of taxes forgone while the U.S. system induces, on average, $2.96 of additional spending. We also find that firms that capitalize R&D costs in Canada spend, on average, 18 percent more on R&D. Collectively, this evidence is important to the ongoing debates in both countries concerning the appropriate design of incentives for R&D and is consistent with the assumptions found in the U.S. tax credit system, but not those found in the Canadian system.

Empirical studies have provided evidence that discrimination exists in various markets, but they rarely allow the analyst to draw conclusions concerning the nature of discrimination. By combining data from bilateral negotiations in the Sportscard market with complementary field experiments, this study provides a framework that amends this shortcoming. The experimental design, which includes data gathered from more than 1100 market participants, provides sharp findings: (i) there is a strong tendency for minorities to receive initial and final offers that are inferior to those received by majorities, and (ii) overall, the data indicate that the observed discrimination is not due to animus, but represents statistical discrimination.

As a remedy for the notorious deficiency of pre-Civil War U. S. macroeconomic data, this study introduces an annual index of American industrial production consistently defined from 1790 until World War I. The index incorporates 43 quantity-based annual series (most entirely new) in the manufacturing and mining industries in a manner similar to the Federal Reserve Board's monthly industrial production index. The index changes our view of the growth and volatility of the U. S. economy before World War I. A direct implication of the index is that antebellum-postbellum differences in industrial volatility are statistically indistinguishable. The index also demonstrates that the pernicious deflationary depressions that purportedly followed the financial panics in 1837 and 1873 were actually rather mild recessions when expressed in real output.

This paper presents a model that provides an explanation, based on regime switching in the real interest rate and learning, of why tests based on stock-adjustment models, Euler equations, or decision rules—which emphasize short-run fluctuations in inventories and the interest rate—are unlikely to uncover a negative relationship between inventories and the real interest rate. The model, however, predicts that inventories will respond to long-run movements, that is, to regime shifts in the real interest rate. Tests emphasizing cointegration techniques confirm this prediction and show a significant long-run relationship between inventories and the real interest rate.

We investigate corporate transparency, defined as the availability of firm‐specific information to those outside publicly traded firms. We conceptualize corporate transparency within a country as output from a multifaceted system whose components collectively produce, gather, validate, and disseminate information. We factor analyze a range of measures capturing countries' firm‐specific information environments, isolating two distinct factors. The first factor, interpreted as financial transparency, captures the intensity and timeliness of financial disclosures, and their interpretation and dissemination by analysts and the media. The second factor, interpreted as governance transparency, captures the intensity of governance disclosures used by outside investors to hold officers and directors accountable. We investigate whether these factors vary with countries' legal/judicial regimes and political economies. Our main multivariate result is that the governance transparency factor is primarily related to a country's legal/judicial regime, whereas the financial transparency factor is primarily related to political economy.