This paper surveys the literature on the determinants and consequences of securities class action lawsuits against firms and auditors from a financial reporting quality perspective. The survey is motivated by the important role that law plays in protecting stakeholders’ interests against managerial misdeed. Litigation is, thus, an important topic and numerous studies investigate the determinant...

This paper investigates the nature and consequences of sample attrition in a unique longitudinal survey of medical doctors. We describe the patterns of non-response and examine if attrition affects the econometric analysis of medical labour market outcomes using the estimation of physician earnings equations as a case study. We compare the econometric gestimates obtained from a number of differ...

A recent study by Hong and Kazperczyk (2005) finds that sin stocks – publicly-traded stocks in the gaming, tobacco, and alcohol industries are neglected by the stock market despite generating abnormal stock returns. We examine a rational explanation for their findings. Are the excess returns and investor neglect of sin stocks attributable to higher levels of information risk arising from poor f...

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a serious, widespread problem that negatively affects women's lives, including their economic status. The current study explored whether the financial harm associated with IPV begins as early as adolescence. With longitudinal data from a sample of 498 women currently or formerly receiving welfare, we used latent growth curve modeling to examine the relationshi...

Using a novel data set on employee stock purchase plans (ESPPs), we examine whether lower-level employees have information about future firm performance. We find that high ESPP purchases are associated with a lower likelihood of future adverse events (earnings restatements and earnings breaks), and a higher likelihood of favorable events (the firm becoming a takeover target). Further, firms in ...

We introduce a method for detecting the presence of time variation and instabilities in the parameters of predictive regressions linking noisy variables such as stock returns to highly persistent predictors such as stock market valuation ratios. Our proposed approach relies on the least squares based squared residuals of the predictive regression and is trivial to implement. More importantly th...

Most studies of the predictability of stock and bond returns rely on in-sample tests. In this paper, we test the ability of ten financial variables that have appeared in the extant literature to predict S&P 500 and CRSP equal-weighted stock returns out-of-sample over horizons of 1-10 years. We also test the ability of two financial variables, the term and default spreads, to predict long-term c...

We provide a theoretical model linking firm characteristics and expected returns. The key ingredient of our model is technological shocks embodied in new capital (IST shocks), which affect the profitability of new investments. Firms’s exposure to IST shocks is endogenously determined by the fraction of firm value due to growth opportunities. In our structural model, several firm characteristics...

This paper explores the information content of insider sudden silence. We hypothesize that insiders strategically choose to be silent when they possess private information not yet reflected in stock prices. Consistent with our hypothesis, insider silence following a routine selling (buying) schedule predicts positive (negative) future abnormal returns as well as earnings surprise. The return pr...