Press reports of investigations of fraud, indictments, and suspensions in military procurement are associated with significantly negative average abnormal returns in the stocks of affected firms. Abnormal stock returns are significantly less negative, however, for firms ranking among the top 100 defense contractors than for unranked contractors, even after one controls for firm size, the frauds' characteristics, and the firm's recidivism. Unranked contractors are penalized heavily for procurment frauds, experiencing both a decline in market value and a subsequent loss in government‐derived revenues. Furthermore, these losses are related to the percentage of the firm's revenues that derive from government contracts. Influential contractors, in contrast, are penalized lightly, experiencing negligible changes in share value and government contract revenue.

Earlier work on U.S. import demand suggest that structural change may have occurred sometime in the mid-1960s. Since this evidence was based upon a somewhat arbitrary splitting of the sample period, the dating of change is uncertain. In this paper we investigate the question of structural change for both U.S. imports and exports, using a procedure that lets the data determine if and when structural change may have occurred. We find weak evidence of structural change for imports in the mid- to late 1960s and much stronger evidence in 1972:1 and thereafter. There is no evidence of structural change for exports.

A mathematical model is analyzed to determine the impact of two alternative monetary policies upon the rate of change of prices and the level of real national income. The first is a once and for all change in the rate of growth of the money supply to a new level; the second is found through an optimization analysis using the maximum principle of postaudit. It is found that the second policy not only leads to a final equilibrium position in less time than the first policy, but it also induces less variability in both prices and real income.

In this study, we examine whether sell-side security analysts gain access to value-relevant information through political connections. We measure analysts' political connections based on political contributions at the brokerage-house level. We argue that if brokerages are able to obtain private information through their political connections, then analysts at politically connected brokerages should issue more profitable stock recommendations, and this increased profitability should be more pronounced for politically sensitive stocks. Our evidence is consistent with these predictions. Analyses of recommendations issued surrounding the Affordable Care Act further support our main inferences. Moreover, our findings hold after we employ numerous tests to address correlated omitted variables and endogeneity. Collectively, these results suggest that brokerages obtain value-relevant, nonpublic information from their political connections.

We investigate the relation between corporate tax payments and corporate social responsibility. Because existing theory and empirical studies find inconsistent evidence on the relation between these constructs, we investigate whether the two activities act as complements or substitutes. We estimate the relation between measures of corporate social responsibility and (1) the amount of corporate taxes paid, and (2) the amount invested in tax lobbying activities using both ordinary least squares and a system of simultaneous equations. We find consistent evidence that corporate social responsibility is negatively related to five-year cash effective tax rates and positively related to tax lobbying expenditures. Our evidence suggests that, on average, corporate social responsibility and tax payments act as substitutes. Data Availability: Data are available from sources identified in the paper.

This study focuses on the relation between current compensation and past performance measures as signals of a chief executive officer's (CEO's) ability. We develop a simple two-period principal-agent model with moral hazard and adverse selection and test theoretical predictions using CEO compensation data from 1993–2006. Consistent with the predictions, we find that salary (bonus) is positively (negatively) associated with past performance for both continuing and newly hired CEOs. We also find that while current salary is positively associated with future performance, current bonus is not. As the model suggests, salary is adjusted to meet the reservation utility and information rent, and is positively correlated over time to reflect ability. Bonus serves to address moral hazard and adverse selection by separating high-ability agents into riskier contracts. Our results indicate that it is important to disaggregate cash compensation into salary and bonus components to understand the dynamic interaction between incentives and performance. Data Availability: Data are available from public sources indicated in the text.

In a setting in which corporate headquarters dictates total sales targets, we study how supervisors allocate sales targets to individual stores. Specifically, we analyze whether supervisors strategically use discretion in the target-setting process to address compensation contracting issues. We first examine whether supervisors use discretion to manage compensation risk. The results are consistent with the agency-theoretic prediction that supervisors provide easier targets to stores facing higher levels of store-specific risk. Next, we examine whether discretion is used to mitigate fairness concerns. The results suggest that, consistent with behavioral arguments, supervisors use discretion to deal with fairness issues, even if the area of the supervisor’s discretion is not the source of the fairness concerns. Finally, we analyze whether supervisors use discretion in the target-setting process to reduce their potential confrontation costs. Consistent with research in psychology, we find that supervisors provide easier targets to store managers with relatively higher hierarchical status.

Using both a market-based and an accrual-based measure of conservatism, we find that firms facing more severe conflicts over dividend policy tend to use more conservative accounting. Furthermore, we document that accounting conservatism is associated with a lower cost of debt after controlling for other determinants of firms' debt costs. Our collective evidence is consistent with the notion that accounting conservatism plays an important role in mitigating bondholder-shareholder conflicts over dividend policy, and in reducing firms' debt costs.

Firms’ inability to commit to future funding choices has profound consequences for capital structure dynamics. With debt in place, shareholders pervasively resist leverage reductions no matter how much such reductions may enhance firm value. Shareholders would instead choose to increase leverage even if the new debt is junior and would reduce firm value. These asymmetric forces in leverage adjustments, which we call the leverage ratchet effect, cause equilibrium leverage outcomes to be history-dependent. If forced to reduce leverage, shareholders are biased toward selling assets relative to potentially more efficient alternatives such as pure recapitalizations.

Milton Friedman argued that irrational traders will consistently lose money, will not survive, and, therefore, cannot influence long‐run asset prices. Since his work, survival and price impact have been assumed to be the same. In this paper, we demonstrate that survival and price impact are two independent concepts. The price impact of irrational traders does not rely on their long‐run survival, and they can have a significant impact on asset prices even when their wealth becomes negligible. We also show that irrational traders' portfolio policies can deviate from their limits long after the price process approaches its long‐run limit.