Search Results
Working Paper
Dotcom Extreme Underpricing
We conjecture that the Dotcom abnormal underpricing resulted from the emergence a large cohort of firms racing for market leadership/survivorship. Fundamentals pricing at the IPO was part of their strategy. Consistent with our conjecture, firms? strategic goals and characteristics fully explain the abnormal underpricing. Contrary to alternatives explanations, underpricing was not associated with top underwriting; there was no deterioration of issuers? quality; and top underwriters and analysts became more selective.
Working Paper
Firms, Skills, and Wage Inequality
We present a model with search frictions and heterogeneous agents that allows us to decompose the overall increase in US wage inequality in the last 30 years into its within- and between-firm and skill components. We calibrate the model to evaluate how much of the overall rise in wage inequality and its components is explained by different channels. Output distribution per firm-skill pair more than accounts for the observed increase over this period. Parametric identification implies that the worker-specific component is responsible for 85 percent of this, compared to 15 percent that is ...
Working Paper
Information Production, Misconduct Effort, and the Duration of Financial Misrepresentation
We examine the link between information produced by auditors and analysts and fraud duration. Using a hazard model, we analyze misstatement periods related to SEC accounting and auditing enforcement releases (AAERs) between 1982 and 2012. Results suggest that misconduct is more likely to end just after firms announce an auditor switch or issue audited financial statements, particularly when the audit report contains explanatory language. Analyst following increases the fraud termination hazard. However, increases (decreases) in analyst coverage have a negative (positive) marginal impact on ...
Working Paper
Oligopsonies over the Business Cycle
With a duopsony model, we show how the degree of labor market slack relates to earnings inequality and firm size distribution across local labor markets and the business cycle. In booms, due to the high aggregate productivity, there is fierce competition with resulting high wages and full employment. During recessions, there is labor market slack and firms enjoy local market power. In periods in which the economy is moving in or out of a recession, there is an “accommodation” phase, with firms shrinking their labor forces and paying lower wages instead of competing for poached workers. We ...
Working Paper
Rival Growth Prospects and Equity Prices: Evidence from Mass Layoff Announcements
We investigate the impact of mass layoff announcements on the equity value of industry rivals. When a layoff announcement conveys good (bad) news for the announcer, rivals on average witness a 0.44 percent increase (0.60 percent decrease) in cumulative abnormal stock returns. This effect is concentrated on rivals with high growth opportunities. Consistent with this finding, we also show that our results are strongest in technology industries, where growth opportunities matter the most. Our results suggest that investors perceive layoff announcements as news about industry prospects rather ...
Journal Article
Excess Savings and Consumer Behavior: Excess Compared to What?
How much accumulated savings do households hold, and what do these savings imply about future consumption? Economists typically consider excess savings when gauging the level of savings that households may use to maintain real consumption as costs rise. Economists have estimated strikingly different levels of currently held excess savings. We highlight the differences between measures of counterfactual savings—that is, the amount of savings households would be expected to hold barring unusual events—and their relevance in computing post pandemic excess savings. Furthermore, we show that, ...
Working Paper
The Dotcom Bubble and Underpricing: Conjectures and Evidence
We provide conjectures for what caused the price spiral and the high underpricing of the dotcom bubble of 1999?2000. We raise two conjectures for the price spiral. First, given the uncertainty about the growth opportunities generated by the new technologies and their spillover effects across technology industries, investors saw the inflow of a large number of high-growth firms as a sign of high growth rates for the market as a whole. Second, investors interpreted the wave of highly underpriced IPOs as an opportunity to obtain gains by investing in newly public companies. The underpricing ...
Working Paper
Collusion in Repeated Auctions with Costless Communication
In this paper, we present a model of repeated first-price private value auctions in which the bidders have access to a cheap talk communication mechanism. In this framework, messages allow bidders to transmit their preference rankings over the goods to be auctioned, similar to Pesendorfer (2000). We show that collusion through this static mechanism not only dominates the static bid rotation mechanism presented by McAfee and McMillan (1992), but it is also not strictly dominated by the dynamic bid rotation mechanism presented by Aoyagi (2003). However, we show that asymptotic efficiency of ...
Working Paper
Competitors' Stock Price Reaction to Mass Layoff Announcements
Using data on layoff announcements by S&P 500 firms, we show that layoff announcements mostly contain industrywide news. Competitors? stock price reactions are positively correlated with the announcer?s returns. This contagion effect is stronger for competitors whose values depend on growth opportunities. When layoff announcements induce positive stock returns to announcers, competitors with positive R&D see a 1.15% increase in their returns. Conversely, when announcements induce negative reactions to announcers, competitors with high sales growth see a reduction of 1.09% in returns. Our ...
Working Paper
Organizations, Skills, and Wage Inequality
We extend an on-the-job search framework in order to allow firms to hire workers with different skills and skills to interact with firms? total factor productivity (TFP). Our model implies that more productive firms are larger, pay higher wages, and hire more workers at all skill levels and proportionately more at higher skill types, matching key stylized facts. We calibrate the model using five educational attainment levels as proxies for skills and estimate nonparametrically firm-skill output from the wage distributions for different educational levels. We consider two periods in time (1985 ...