Under the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996, individuals convicted of drug-related felonies were permanently banned from receiving welfare and food stamps. Since then, over 30 states have opted out of the federal ban. In this paper, I estimate the impact of public assistance eligibility on recidivism by exploiting both the adoption of the federal ban and subsequent passage of state laws that lifted the ban. Using administrative prison records on five million offenders and a triple-differences research design, I find that public assistance eligibility for drug offenders reduces one-year recidivism rates by 10 percent.

Does speculative trade reduce mispricing and help create efficient markets or does it drive prices further from fundamentals? We analyze betting exchange trading on 9,562 UK horse races in 2013 and 2014 to find out. Crucially, as each race is run, the fundamental value of bets is unambiguously revealed. We find that the volume of trade is predictive of fundamentals, suggesting that speculative trade is on average conducive to market efficiency. However, much of this effect is concentrated in the in-running period during races when, even without trade, asset fundamentals would be revealed seconds later.

Relatively little is known about the empirical performance of infinite-activity Lévy jump models, especially with non-affine volatility dynamics. We use extensive empirical data sets to study how infinite-activity Variance Gamma and Normal Inverse Gaussian (NIG) jumps with affine and non-affine volatility dynamics improve goodness of fit and option pricing performance. With Markov Chain Monte Carlo, different model specifications are estimated using the joint information of the S&P 500 index and the VIX. Our article provides clear evidence that a parsimonious non-affine model with NIG return jumps and a linear variance specification is particularly competitive, even during the recent crisis.

We characterize the properties of optimal accounting rules in a signaling game. An impatient firm sells shares to competitive investors. The firm can signal its private information about the fundamental by retaining a fraction of the shares. In addition, the firm can commit to disclosing information according to a set of accounting rules chosen ex ante. Information disclosure reduces signaling cost so that perfect disclosure is optimal. When perfect disclosure is impossible, the optimal accounting rule features a lower bound and a summary statistic of the fundamental. The interpretation of the lower bound is consistent with accounting conservatism, and the statistic summarizes the information most relevant to the firm׳s valuation. The justification for accounting conservatism relies on the existence of information asymmetry and the infeasibility of perfect accounting disclosure. This is consistent with the conjecture of LaFond and Watts (2008) that information asymmetry calls for accounting conservatism.

We use exchange-traded options to identify risks relevant to capital structure adjustments in firms. These forward-looking market-based risk measures provide significant explanatory power in predicting net leverage changes in excess of accounting data. They matter most during contractionary periods and for growth firms. We form market-based indices that capture firms' magnitudes of, and propensity for, net leverage increases. Firms with larger predicted leverage increases outperform firms with lower predicted increases by 3.1% to 3.9% per year in buy-and-hold abnormal returns. Finally, consistent with the quality, leverage, and distress risk puzzles, firms with lower predicted leverage increases are riskier but earn lower abnormal returns.

We develop a model to illustrate that equity-based compensation for non-executive employees and product market decisions are related. When the product market is competitive and employees have low bargaining power , the unique equilibrium is for each firm’s owners to offer equity-based compensation to their employees. In this setting, equity-based compensation leads to a lower wage rate, which makes each firm more competitive with its rival. However, this unique equilibrium is a Prisoner’s Dilemma for the firms’ original owners. Our results are consistent with several empirical regularities and provide predictions on when firms will offer equity-based compensation to their employees.

We find that ownership by different types of institutional investors has varying implications for future firm misvaluation and governance characteristics. Dedicated institutional investors decrease future firm misvaluation, in both direction and magnitude, relative to fundamentals. In contrast, transient institutional investors have the opposite effect. Using the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Regulation FD as an exogenous shock to information dissemination, we find evidence consistent with dedicated institutions having an information advantage. Similarly, dedicated investors are associated with better future governance characteristics, while transient investors are not. The valuation effects are primarily driven by institutional portfolio concentration while the governance effects are driven by portfolio turnover. These results imply a more nuanced relationship between institutional ownership and firm value and corporate governance.

We show that a linear pure strategy equilibrium may not exist in the model of Madrigal (1996), contrary to the claim of the original paper. This is because Madrigal's characterization of a pure strategy equilibrium omits a second‐order condition. If the nonfundamental speculator's information about noise trading is sufficiently precise, a linear pure strategy equilibrium fails to exist. In parameter regions where a pure strategy equilibrium does exist, we identify a few calculation errors in Madrigal (1996) that result in misleading implications.

This paper estimates the effect of Chapter 13 bankruptcy protection on financial health using a new data set linking bankruptcy filings to credit bureau records. Our empirical strategy uses the leniency of randomly assigned judges as an instrument for Chapter 13 protection. We find that Chapter 13 protection decreases an index measuring adverse financial events such as civil judgments and repossessions by 0.323 standard deviations and increases the probability of being a homeowner by 13.2 percentage points. Chapter 13 protection has little impact on open unsecured debt but decreases the amount of debt in collections by $1,333.