Given the recent controversy over deviations of street earnings from GAAP earnings, we show that the nonrecurring items that analysts include in street earnings are more persistent and have higher valuation multiples than those items they exclude from street earnings. In addition, we find no evidence that the pricing differential between the included and excluded items leads to future abnormal returns. If, as analysts claim, the primary use of street earnings is to value a stock, then our results suggest that analysts do have expertise in processing earnings information and that certain items appear justifiably excluded.

ABSTRACT While many firms grant executive stock options that can be repriced, other firms systematically restrict or prohibit repricing. This article investigates the determinants of firms' repricing policies and the consequences of such policies for executive turnover and retention. Firms that have better internal governance, that use more powerful stock‐based incentives, or that face less shareholder scrutiny are more likely to maintain repricing flexibility. Firms that restrict repricing are more vulnerable to voluntary executive turnover following stock price declines. When share price declines are severe, restricting firms appear to award unusually large numbers of new options.

This study clarifies the conditions under which learning in games produces convergence to Nash equilibria in practice. We experimentally investigate the role of supermodularity, which is closely related to the more familiar concept of strategic complementarities, in achieving convergence through learning. Using a game from the literature on solutions to externalities, we find that supermodular and “near-supermodular” games converge significantly better than those far below the threshold of supermodularity. From a little below the threshold to the threshold, the improvement is statistically insignificant. Increasing the parameter far beyond the threshold does not significantly improve convergence.

The sequential-financing hypothesis advanced by Mayers [J. Financ. Econ. 47 (1998) 83] suggests that convertibles are more valuable for issuing firms with focused activities. The hypothesis also suggests that firms may design their convertibles so that there are sufficient internal funds for future investment expenditures so as to avoid the costs of accessing capital markets. This paper provides direct evidence for these two predictions. We find that the stock market responds more favorably to the announcements of convertible offerings by focused firms than to those by diversified firms. This finding holds even after controlling for other potential explanatory variables. We also find that the issuing firms' net new financing is not significantly different from zero over the life of the convertible debt. Thus, our results provide further support for the sequential-financing hypothesis that convertible debt financing is motivated by a desire to minimize security issue costs and agency costs of overinvestment for firms with promising growth opportunities to finance a sequence of potential investment options.

From 1996 to 1998, listed companies in China were required to achieve a minimum return on equity (ROE) of 10 percent in each of the previous three years before they could apply for permission to issue additional shares. As a result of this rule, there was a heavy concentration of ROEs in the area just above 10 percent. We show that the Chinese regulators appear to have scrutinized firms using excess amounts of nonoperating income to reach the 10 percent hurdle. In addition, their ability to do so seems to have improved over time, which allows them to be better able to identify firms that subsequently performed better. However, many firms were still able to gain rights issue approval through excess nonoperating income. We show that these firms subsequently underperformed other approved firms that did not use the same practice, indicating that the Chinese regulators' objective of guiding capital resources toward the well-performing sectors is partially compromised by earnings management.

ABSTRACT We study the price effects of changes to the S&P 500 index and document an asymmetric price response: There is a permanent increase in the price of added firms but no permanent decline for deleted firms. These results are at odds with extant explanations of the effects of index changes that imply a symmetric price response to additions and deletions. A possible explanation for asymmetric price effects arises from the changes in investor awareness. Results from our empirical tests support the thesis that changes in investor awareness contribute to the asymmetric price effects of S&P 500 index additions and deletions.

We posit that limited transparency of firms’ operations to outside investors increases demands on governance systems to alleviate moral hazard problems. We investigate how ownership concentration, directors’ and executive's incentives, and board structure vary with: (1) earnings timeliness, and (2) organizational complexity measured as geographic and/or product line diversification. We find that ownership concentration, directors’ and executives’ equity-based incentives, and outside directors’ reputations vary inversely with earnings timeliness, and that ownership concentration, and directors’ equity-based incentives increase with firm complexity. However, board size and the percentage of inside directors do not vary significantly with earnings timeliness or firm complexity.

We investigate the effect of scale on performance in the active money management industry. We first document that fund returns, both before and after fees and expenses, decline with lagged fund size, even after accounting for various performance benchmarks. We then explore a number of potential explanations for this relationship. This association is most pronounced among funds that have to invest in small and illiquid stocks, suggesting that these adverse scale effects are related to liquidity. Controlling for its size, a fund's return does not deteriorate with the size of the family that it belongs to, indicating that scale need not be bad for performance depending on how the fund is organized. Finally, using data on whether funds are solo-managed or team-managed and the composition of fund investments, we explore the idea that scale erodes fund performance because of the interaction of liquidity and organizational diseconomies.