We analyze the relative advantage of option grants compared to stock compensation when shareholders are diversified. Our analysis recognizes a conflict that is largely neglected in the corporate finance literature. Shareholders want to maximize their portfolio value while capital budgeting rules direct managers to choose projects that maximize firm (equity) value. Options can reduce this conflict by motivating managers to avoid projects that enhance the value of one firm at the expense of another firm. Also, in our framework, relative performance evaluation destroys value for shareholders as it encourages firms to engage in cannibalistic activity. Consistent with the predictions of our model we find that firms with lower insider ownership, higher institutional ownership, and lower leverage tend to provide more option grants as compensation to their executives.

This paper introduces Sentiment Inequality (SI)—the difference in sentiment between high- and low-income consumers—and demonstrates its predictive power for firm performance, asset prices, and market trends. Using the restaurant industry as a case study, we show that changes in SI predict the relative performance of high-end firms (casual dining restaurants) versus low-end firms (fast-food chains). These findings extend beyond the restaurant sector, revealing that SI predicts the relative performance of high- versus low-end firms across the entire market. SI emerges as a critical proxy for business cycle fluctuations, providing incremental informational value over aggregate sentiment measures and established predictors.

Using comprehensive time stamp data on earnings announcements collected from newswires, we show that earnings news announced within trading hours results in approximately 50% smaller immediate reaction compared to similar earnings announced outside trading hours. Negative news tends to be announced during trading hours, which, together with the reduced response, may allow for managerial opportunistic behavior. We also provide evidence that announcement timing is affected by internal corporate governance. Recent regulations that tightened firms’ governance are associated with a significant shift to announcing outside trading hours, especially for firms with better corporate governance. Our surveys of corporate managers corroborate these results.

Using combinations of weekdays and times of day (before, during, and after trading hours) of earnings announcements, we examine whether managers attempt to strategically time these announcements. We document that the worst earnings news is announced on Friday evening and find robust evidence that only Friday evening announcements represent managers’ rational opportunistic behavior. Friday evening announcements are followed by insider trading in the direction of earnings news and the largest post-earnings announcement drift. Managers also attempt to reduce interaction with investors and hide more than just earnings news by announcing on Friday evening. We find that Friday evening announcements occur later in the evening than announcements on other evenings, firms have a reduced propensity to hold conference calls, and major firm restructuring events are relatively more likely to occur after Friday evening announcements.

We analyze the puzzling behavior of the volatility of individual stock returns over the past few decades. The literature has provided many different explanations to the trend in volatility and this paper tests the viability of the different explanations. Virtually all current theoretical arguments that are provided for the trend in the average level of volatility over time lend themselves to explanations about the difference in volatility levels between firms in the cross-section. We therefore focus separately on the cross-sectional and time-series explanatory power of the different proxies. We fail to find a proxy that is able to explain both dimensions well. In particular, we find that Cao et al. [Cao, C., Simin, T.T., Zhao, J., 2008. Can growth options explain the trend in idiosyncratic risk? Review of Financial Studies 21, 2599–2633] market-to-book ratio tracks average volatility levels well, but has no cross-sectional explanatory power. On the other hand, the low-price proxy suggested by Brandt et al. [Brandt, M.W., Brav, A., Graham, J.R., Kumar, A., 2010. The idiosyncratic volatility puzzle: time trend or speculative episodes. Review of Financial Studies 23, 863–899] has much cross-sectional explanatory power, but has virtually no time-series explanatory power. We also find that the different proxies do not explain the trend in volatility in the period prior to 1995 (R-squared of virtually zero), but explain rather well the trend in volatility at the turn of the Millennium (1995–2005).

We find that the sign of the correlation between institutional ownership and volatility depends on the firm’s dividend policy: institutional ownership is negatively (positively) related to volatility among non-dividend (dividend) paying stocks. The empirical results are consistent with an interaction between institutional preference for low volatility and the tendency of higher levels of institutional ownership to increase volatility through their trading behavior. This result is robust to many control variables and possible endogeneity concerns. Supporting our conjecture that institutions herd on dividend signals we find that the correlation between turnover and institutional ownership is higher for dividend paying stocks, and that the positive correlation between turnover and institutional ownership is higher on dividend declaration days. Finally, we also find that the level of institutional ownership drops following an increase in volatility for both dividend payers and non-payers, and that volatility rises following increased institutional ownership for dividend paying stocks.

We report reduced market response to Friday announcements of dividend changes, seasoned equity offerings, share repurchases, earnings, and mergers, which is seemingly consistent with the notion of investor inattention on Fridays. However, we show that these findings are an outcome of selection bias. Firms that make announcements on Fridays experience reduced market response on any weekday and have common unobserved characteristics across announcement types. After correcting for selection bias, there is no evidence that investors pay less attention to announcements made on Fridays. The method introduced here is applicable to other studies in which an exogenous factor influencing firm performance can actually be associated with firm characteristics.

We analyze the extent to which citing practices may be driven by strategic considerations. The discontinuation of the Journal of Business (JB) in 2006 for extraneous reasons serves as an exogenous shock for analyzing strategic citing behavior. Using a difference-in-differences analysis, we find that articles published in JB before 2006 experienced a relative reduction in citations of approximately 20% after 2006. Since the discontinuation of JB is unrelated to the scientific contributions of its articles, the results imply that the referencing of articles is systematically affected by strategic considerations, which hinders scientific progress.

This study examines the impact of partisan control of the United States Congress on corporations and the economy. The findings indicate that economic performance is weaker when neither party holds a majority in both chambers of Congress, resulting in a divided Congress. We propose that this outcome may be attributed to a decrease in the level and quality of regulation during divided Congress terms. To analyze the immediate effects of regulation on the economy, we leverage congressional recess periods as a source of exogenous variation. Consistent with the conjecture that the composition of Congress affects the economy through its regulatory activity, we demonstrate that a divided Congress negatively impacts economic performance when Congress is in session but has no significant effect during recesses (when regulation does not occur). In conclusion, congressional cycles and the presence of effective regulation are shown to be crucial factors influencing economic activity.