We provide evidence consistent with firm managers opportunistically defining non-GAAP earnings in order to meet or beat analyst expectations. This result is robust to controlling for other tools of benchmark beating (e.g., discretionary accruals, real earnings management, and expectation management). We also find that managers tend to exclude more expenses from non-GAAP earnings when it is costlier to use accrual earnings management due to balance sheet constraints, indicating that these tools are substitutes. Lastly, we find that investors discount positive earnings surprises when accompanied by exclusions from GAAP earnings, suggesting that the market partially understands the opportunistic nature of these exclusions. Our evidence is consistent with managers opportunistically defining non-GAAP earnings in a way that analysts fail to fully anticipate, resulting in an increased likelihood of exceeding analyst forecasts.

In this article, I propose and estimate a dynamic model of education, borrowing, and work decisions of high school graduates. I examine the effect of relaxing borrowing constraints on educational attainment by simulating increases in the amount students are permitted to borrow from government-sponsored loan programs. My results indicate that borrowing constraints have a small impact on attainment: the removal of education-related borrowing constraints raises bachelor’s degree completion by 2.4 percentage points. Tuition subsidies are necessary to obtain larger increases: I find that higher subsidies for average-ability students are the most cost effective targeted tuition subsidies.

In this study we examine the impact of the Securities and Exchange Commission's (SEC) decision to accelerate the filing of 10-Ks. The SEC argued that the accelerated deadline would increase the relevance of the disclosures, making the reports more useful. Opponents countered that the accelerated deadline would decrease the representational faithfulness of the disclosures, especially for smaller firms. We document a significant decrease in the 10-K market reaction for smaller firms as they accelerate from 90 to 75 days. For larger firms we find no significant change in the market reaction from 90 to 75 days. However, as these larger firms accelerate their 10-K deadline to 60 days, we find a significant increase in the market reaction. We also examine changes in reporting quality, shifts in information content, and changes in 10-K filing order and clustering and find results that are consistent with accelerated filing having significant impacts on representational faithfulness and relevance.

We analyze the impact of bank internationalization on domestic market power (Lerner index) and risk for German banks. Risk is measured by the official declaration of regulatory authorities that a bank is distressed. We distinguish the volume of foreign assets, the number of foreign countries, and different modes of foreign entry. Our analysis has three main results. First, higher market power is associated with lower risk. Second, holding assets in many countries reduce market power at home, but banks with a higher share of foreign assets exhibit higher market power. Third, bank internationalization is only weakly related to bank risk.

This paper theoretically and empirically investigates how the risk of future adverse price changes created by the anticipated arrival of information influences risk‐averse investors’ trading decisions in institutionally imperfect capital markets. Specifically, I examine how the selling activity of individual investors immediately following an earnings announcement is influenced by the tradeoff between risk‐sharing benefits of immediate trade and explicit transaction costs imposed on such trades. Consistent with my theoretically derived predictions, I find that investors’ current trading decisions are less sensitive to the incremental transaction costs created by short‐term capital gains taxes on trading profits, as both the duration and intensity of the risk of future adverse price changes increase. This evidence is consistent with an incremental cost to investors that results from the revelation of precise information, which is commonly referred to as the Hirshleifer Effect.

[We study the relations between management contract terms and performance in private equity using new data for 837 funds from 1984–2010. We find no evidence that higher fees or lower managerial ownership are associated with lower net-of-fee performance. Nevertheless, compensation rises and shifts to performance-insensitive components during fundraising booms. Further, the behavior of distributions around contractual fee triggers is consistent with an underlying agency conflict between investors and fund managers. Our evidence suggests that managers with higher fees deliver higher gross performance, and highlights that agency costs are an inevitable consequence of the information frictions endemic to agency relationships.]

Luck, skill and labor markets all have empirical support as determinants of managerial compensation. We examine the relative importance of pay for luck, managerial skill and labor market opportunities in determining compensation. We measure luck as the predictable component of firm performance, measure skill using managerial fixed effects and measure labor market opportunities as the compensation of executives at matched firms. Our results imply that managerial skill is the most important determinant of managers' compensation, followed by firm size and labor market opportunities, and that luck is not an important determinant of managerial compensation.

We introduce a simple method for constructing a scoring rule to elicit an agent's belief about a random variable that is incentive compatible irrespective of her risk-preference. The agent receives a fixed prize when her prediction error, defined by a loss function specified in the incentive scheme, is smaller than an independently generated random number and earns a smaller prize otherwise. Adjusting the loss function according to the belief elicitation objective, the scoring rule can be used in a rich assortment of situations. Moreover, the scoring rule can be incentive compatible even when the agent is not an expected utility maximizer. Results from our probability elicitation experiments show that subjects' predictions are closer to the true probability under this scoring rule compared to the quadratic scoring rule.

Short sellers are routinely blamed for destabilizing stock markets by exacerbating deviations from fundamental values. In response, regulators periodically impose short sale constraints aimed at preventing excessive stock market declines. One explanation is that policy makers regard short sellers as behaving like positive feedback traders. Relying on the theoretical model put forward by Sentana and Wadhwani (1992), which stresses the conditional nature of returns’ persistence, bans on selected financial stocks in six countries during the 2008/2009 global financial crisis are examined. These provide us with a setting to analyze the impact of short sale restrictions on feedback trading. Our findings suggest that, in the majority of markets examined, restrictions of this kind amplify positive feedback trading during periods of high volatility and, hence, contribute to stock market downturns. On balance then, short selling bans do not contribute to enhancing financial stability.