This paper presents a theory of risk management in which the choices of managers over effort and risk are imperfectly monitored by outsiders. In a principal-agent framework, risk management can reduce extraneous noise in the variables outsiders observe or create opportunities for self-dealing behavior. Solving this trade-off, the analysis characterizes which events should be hedged and how exec...

This paper examines whether the “soft” information contained in the text of management’s quarterly earnings press releases is incrementally informative over the company’s reported “hard” earnings news. We use Diction, a textual-analysis program, to extract various dimensions of managerial net optimism from more than 20,000 corporate earnings announcements over the period 1998 to 2006 and docume...

This dissertation consists of two essays. The first essay provides a rational explanation of the mysterious earnings discontinuity phenomenon. It also develops two new empirical predictions which are supported by the empirical tests. The second essay identifies conditions under which leading indicator variables discourage long-term investment. Essay 1: Discontinuity in Earnings Distribution: A ...

This study of the determinants of earnings among adult foreign-born men using the 1990 Census of Population focuses on the effects of the respondent's own English language skills, the effects of living in a linguistic enclave, and the stage of the business cycle at entry into the U.S. labor market. The analysis demonstrates the importance of English language fluency among the foreign born from ...

This paper proposes a new method for estimating the intergenerational persistence of lifetime earnings from data that contain only short sections of individual earnings histories. The approach infers lifetime earnings persistence from the persistence of short earnings averages together with information about the stochastic process governing individual earnings. I …nd that lifetime earnings are ...

The methods underpinning the UK’s annual structural earnings survey – the New Earnings Survey (NES) – have remained largely unchanged since the survey’s inception in 1970. A recent major review of earnings statistics in the UK, along with gradual changes in the labour market in recent years have led to a re-design of the NES. This paper describes some of the shortcomings of the NES and then pre...

This study consists introductory survey and three essays where investors’ trading responses to interim earnings announcements are studied using Finnish data. The essays are individual papers, but their topics are closely connected since they address the trading response from different angles. The essays progress from an aggregated to a more detailed examination. The first essay was conducted on...

The zero distribution of orthogonal polynomials pn,N , n = 0, 1, . . . generated by recurrence coefficients an,N and bn,N depending on a parameter N has been recently considered by Kuijlaars and Van Assche under the assumption that an,N and bn,N behave like a(n/N) and b(n/N), respectively, where a(·) and b(·) are continuous functions. Here, we extend this result by allowing a(·) and b(·) to be ...

The purpose of this paper is to find out a set of general recurrence formulas for the calculus of the SU(3) Clebsch-Gordan coefficients. The first six sections are introductory, presenting the notations and general group theoretical methods applied to SU(3). The following eight sections are devoted to a detailed treatment of the carrier spaces of the irreducible representations and their direct...