Using quarterly data and benchmarks based on past performance-characteristics, I find little evidence that earnings change following 661 dividend decreases and 872 dividend omissions between 1980 and 1998. The exception is that earnings deteriorate during the quarter of dividend omissions, but they recover within a couple of quarters. My results further suggest that the lack of a more pronounce...

ABSTRACT We present theory and empirical evidence that greater financial reporting quality can incentivize myopic investments. In the model, increases investor response to earnings, elevating manager’s incentive invest myopically improve earnings. Using setting of Big N auditors’ acquisitions non-Big Ns, which increased earnings for acquired client firms, we find supporting Specifically, client...

This paper studies the design of the optimal non linear taxation in an economy where longevity varies across agents, and depends on three factors: longevity genes, health investment and farsightedness. Provided earnings, farsightedness and genes are correlated, governmental intervention can be justified on two grounds: correction for a lack of farsightedness and redistribution across both earni...

We analyze the changes in earnings of paid workers (wage earners) in rural India from 2004/05 to 2011/12. Real earnings increased at all percentiles, and the percentage increase was larger at the lower end. Consequently, earnings inequality declined. Recentered influence function decompositions show that throughout the earnings distribution, except at the very top, both changes in “worker chara...

We examine the impact of sibling gender composition on women’s adult earnings. Using data from Add Health, we find that women with any brothers earn roughly 10 percent less than women with no brothers in their late 20s and early 30s. This effect is primarily due to lower earnings within broadly defined education and occupation groups. We then explore mechanisms that may explain this result. We ...

Proponents of compensation plans based on economic profits argue that these plans control for deficiencies in stock-based or earnings-based bonus plans and thereby better align managers’ and shareholders’ interests. We examine whether compensation plans based on economic profits do in fact produce better investment decisions. We use a sample of 51 firms adopting economic profit plans between 19...

Ang, Hodrick, Xing, and Zhang (2006a) show that stocks with high idiosyncratic return volatility tend to have low future returns. This paper further documents that idiosyncratic volatility is inversely related to future earning shocks, and more importantly, that the returnpredictive power of idiosyncratic volatility is induced by its information content about future earnings. We examine various...

Income Inequality, Equality of Opportunity, and Intergenerational Mobility Families, labor markets, and public policies all structure a child’s opportunities and determine the extent to which adult earnings are related to family background. Cross-country comparisons and the underlying trends suggest that these drivers will most likely lower the degree of intergenerational earnings mobility for ...

This paper aims to examine whether the 2007 IFRS converged Chinese GAAP has improved the quality of accounting information for investors in the A-share market in China. We analyse investor’s reaction to financial information released pre and post IFRS convergence in China. Multiple regression analysis was employed using data from 309 listed Chinese companies. The findings of this study show tha...

This dissertation studies the impact of learning about unobserved payoff-relevant variables on economic decisions. In chapter 1, I study a labor market in which employers learn about a worker’s unobserved skills by observing output. Skills evolve as a mean-reverting process with a trend that is potentially endogenous due to human capital accumulation. Output is additively separable in the worke...