Explore the vast range of titles available.

Perhaps no kind of regulation is more common or less useful than mandated disclosure-requiring one party to a transaction to give the other information. It is the iTunes terms you assent to, the doctor's consent form you sign, the pile of papers you get with your mortgage. Reading the terms, the form, and the papers is supposed to equip you to choose your purchase, your treatment, and your loan well.More Than You Wanted to Knowsurveys the evidence and finds that mandated disclosure rarely works. But how could it? Who reads these disclosures? Who understands them? Who uses them to make better choices? Omri Ben-Shahar and Carl Schneider put the regulatory problem in human terms. Most people find disclosures complex, obscure, and dull. Most people make choices by stripping information away, not layering it on. Most people find they can safely ignore most disclosures and that they lack the literacy to analyze them anyway. And so many disclosures are mandated that nobody could heed them all. Nor can all this be changed by simpler forms in plainer English, since complex things cannot be made simple by better writing. Furthermore, disclosure is a lawmakers' panacea, so they keep issuing new mandates and expanding old ones, often instead of taking on the hard work of writing regulations with bite. Timely and provocative,More Than You Wanted to Knowtakes on the form of regulation we encounter daily and asks why we must encounter it at all.

In a leveraged buyout, a company is acquired by a specialized investment firm using a relatively small portion of equity and a relatively large portion of outside debt financing. The leveraged buyout investment firms today refer to themselves (and are generally referred to) as private equity firms. We describe and present time series evidence on the private equity industry, considering both firms and transactions. We discuss the existing empirical evidence on the economics of the firms and transactions. We consider similarities and differences between the recent private equity wave and the wave of the 1980s. Finally, we speculate on what the evidence implies for the future of private equity.

The relation between investment bank reputation and the price and quality of bond underwriting services is studied here. After controlling for endogeneity in issuer-underwriter matching, I find that reputable banks obtain lower yields and charge higher fees, but issuers' net proceeds are higher. These relations are pronounced in the junk-bond category, in which reputable banks' underwriting criteria are most stringent. These findings suggest that banks' underwriting decisions reflect reputation concerns, and are thus informative of issue quality. They also suggest that economic rents are earned on reputation, and thereby provide continued incentives for underwriters to maintain reputation.

We examine changes in the pricing and financial structure of large management buyouts in the 1980s. Over time, (1) buyout price to cash flow ratios rose in absolute terms (particularly in deals financed using public junk bonds); (2) required bank principal repayments accelerated, leading to sharply lower ratios of cash flow to total debt obligations; (3) private subordinated and bank debt were replaced by public junk debt; and (4) management teams and dealmakers took more money out of transactions up front. These patterns are consistent with an “overheating” phenomenon in the buyout market. Preliminary post-buyout evidence lends some support to this interpretation.

The client alleged the firm made unsuitable trades in her account, including in high-risk equities and \"junk bonds.\"

School messaging app Remind will soon face a major disruption to its texting service, after communications giant Verizon announced that it will charge an additional fee on all SMS messages sent by the company.

Securities issued under Rule 144A do not have to file a public registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission, but can be sold only to qualified financial institutions. This paper examines industrial and utility bonds issued under Rule 144A. Rule 144A issues are found to have higher yields than publicly issued bonds after adjusting for risk. Yield premiums are higher if the issuer does not file periodic financial statements with the SEC. The yield premiums of Rule 144A issues may be due to lower liquidity, information uncertainty, and weaker legal protection for investors. Bonds issued under Rule 144A may have registration rights, which require the issuer to exchange the bonds for public bonds within a stated period, or pay higher yields. While high-yield bonds usually have registration rights, we find that the majority of investment-grade bonds do not. Registration rights have a greater impact on yields for high-yield than for investment-grade bonds. Underwriter fees for Rule 144A issues are not significantly different from underwriter fees for publicly issued bonds.