Research Lab

We analyze strategic speculators' incentives to trade on information in a model where firm value is endogenous to trading, due to feedback from the financial market to corporate decisions. Trading on private information reveals this information to managers and improves their real decisions, enhancing fundamental value. While this feedback effect increases the profitability of buying on good news, it reduces the profitability of selling on bad news, and thus has an asymmetric effect on trading behavior.

We investigate the consequences of the "revolving door" for trial lawyers at the SEC's enforcement division. If future job opportunities motivate SEC lawyers to develop and/or showcase their enforcement expertise, then the revolving door phenomenon will promote more aggressive regulatory activity (the "human capital" hypothesis). In contrast, SEC lawyers can relax enforcement efforts in order to develop networking skills and/or curry favor with prospective employers at private law firms (the "rent seeking" hypothesis).

This essay analyzes some problems that accounting standard setters confront in erecting barriers to managers bent on boosting their firms' financial reports through financial engineering (FE) activities. It also poses some unsolved research questions regarding interactions between preparers and standard setters. It starts by discussing the history of lease accounting to illustrate the institutional disadvantage of standard setters relative to preparers in their speeds of response.

In 2013, a new law required Indian firms, which satisfied certain size and profitability thresholds, to spend at least 2% of their net income on CSR. We exploit this natural experiment to isolate the shareholder value implications of CSR activities.

We ask nearly 400 CFOs about the definition and drivers of earnings quality, with a special emphasis on the prevalence and detection of earnings misrepresentation. CFOs believe that the hallmarks of earnings quality are sustainability, absence of one-time items, and backing by actual cash flows. Earnings quality is determined in about equal measure by controllable factors like internal controls and corporate governance, and non-controllable factors like industry membership and macroeconomic conditions.

Despite their strong positive average returns across numerous asset classes, momentum strategies can experience infrequent and persistent strings of negative returns. These momentum crashes are partly forecastable. They occur in "panic" states — following market declines and when market volatility is high — and are contemporaneous with market rebounds. We show that the low ex-ante expected returns in panic states are consistent with a conditionally high premium attached to the option-like payoffs of past losers.

In this paper we address two questions that emerged in the aftermath of the 2008 financial/banking crisis. First, did the financial statements of bank holding companies provide an early warning of their impending distress? Second, were the actions of four key financial intermediaries (short sellers, equity analysts, Standard and Poor's credit ratings and auditors) sensitive to the information in the banks' financial statements about their increased risk and potential distress?

Value stocks earn higher returns than growth stocks on average, but it is well documented that those returns come with risk. This paper supplies an understanding of that risk in terms of fundamentals. The fundamental analysis informs that, in buying value stocks, the investor may be trapped into buying firms where prospective earnings growth is quite risky. However, the trap can be avoided by recognizing how earnings and book value are accounted for in financial statements. Specifically, the application of conservative accounting informs the investor ex ante of the risk involved.

We develop a simple dynamic investment strategy that allows long‐term passive investors to hedge climate risk without sacrificing financial returns. Our proposed hedging strategy goes beyond a simple divestment of high carbon footprint or stranded assets stocks. This is just the first step. The second step is to optimize the composition of the low carbon portfolio so as to minimize the tracking error with the reference benchmark index. We show that tracking error can be almost eliminated even for a low carbon index that has 50% less carbon footprint.