This thesis comprises of three essays. The first essay is titled ‘Do Acquiring Firms Manage Earnings?’ and is co-authored with Professor Anand M. Vijh. The second essay is titled ‘Do Firms Have a Target Leverage? Evidence from Credit Markets’ and is joint work with Professors Anand M. Vijh and Redouane Elkamhi. The third is essay is single authored and titled ‘Bondholder Wealth Effects of Fraud...

We propose a framework to estimate earnings distributions and worker and firm unobserved heterogeneity on matched panel data. We introduce two models: a static model that allows for interaction effects between workers and firms, and a dynamic model that allows in addition for Markovian dynamics in earnings and mobility decisions. We establish identification in short panels. We develop a tractab...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the association between the intellectual capital of firms and their earnings quality. The Research was conducted with 158 accepted companies and 948 firm-year observations from Iran stock market. Empirical studies were conducted based on hypothesis by Value Added Intellectual Coefficient as measures of intellectual capital and taking absolute value of...

Following Rosen [1981], superstar effects (earnings convex in quality and a few firms reaping a large share of market earnings) occur with imperfect substitution between sellers, low (and possibly declining) marginal cost of output, and marginal cost falling as quality increases. However, markets without such characteristics have superstar effects, and the main result from the superstar model —...

This paper examines earnings changes surrounding firms' decisions to initiate or omit dividend payments. Firms that initiate (omit) dividend payments have positive (negative) earnings changes both before and after the dividend policy change. The subsequent earnings changes arc positively related to the dividend announcement return. Also, the stock price reactions at the announcement of subseque...

This paper uses a linked employer-employee dataset from the Ghanaian manufacturing sector to analyze earnings dispersion in Ghana from 1992 to 2003, a period post extensive economic reforms. I find that variance of earnings increased from 1992 to 1998 and decreased thereafter, resembling an inverted u-shaped relationship. I use analysis of variance and variance decomposition approaches to under...

Available online 13 November 2014 This study examines the relationship between family firms and earnings management by considering the influence of board independence. Based on a sample of 379 listed high-technology firms over 7 years in Taiwan, we find that family firms are positively related to earnings management. Further, we find two interaction effects: (1) the proportion of independent di...

Abstract Using cash flows from a large sample of buyout and venture funds, I show that private equity (PE) distributions predict returns in the industries funds’ specialization. My tests distinguish timing skill reactions to market conditions spillover effects PE activity. Fund managers foresee comparable public firms’ earnings but sell at industry peaks only if they have performance fees harve...