Booming markets are a time of high returns and high risk, including the risk of misrepresenting the quality of an investment. The Chinese bond market has recently been going through a boom period, and we document evidence of ratings shopping in the enterprise bond market. Our evidence shows that...

This paper investigates the impact of seventeen US macroeconomic announcements on two broad and representative commodity futures indices. Based on a large sample from 1989 to 2005, we show that the daily price response of the CRB and GSCI commodity futures indices to macroeconomic news is...

This paper investigates whether the Standard amp; Poors (Samp;P) transparency and disclosure (Tamp;D)rankings informed the financial markets with respect to firms' corporate governance and disclosure practices when the results of the study were released by Samp;P on October 15, 2002. The Samp;P...

This study examines whether corporate social responsibility (CSR) is related to the likelihood of corporate inversions, a legal tax planning strategy. We use a full sample to test stakeholder theory and a risk-management view of CSR. We find that firms with higher CSR performance are less likely...

We examine the relation between customer concentration, a critically important aspect of a firm's business model, and the level of corporate tax avoidance. A firm with a concentrated corporate customer base needs to hold more cash, faces a higher likelihood of financial distress, has a stronger...

This paper investigates the effectiveness of using securities class action lawsuits in monitoring defendant firms by institutional lead plaintiffs from two aspects: (1) immediate litigation outcomes, including the probability of surviving the motion to dismiss and the settlement amount, and (2)...

Masulis and Mobbs (2014, 2015) find that independent directors with multiple directorships allocate their monitoring effort unequally based on a directorship's relative prestige. We investigate whether bank loan contract terms reflect such unequal allocation of directors' monitoring effort. We...

We investigate the effects of the filing of securities class actions on firms' cost of equity capital and shareholder wealth. We posit that class action litigation increases perceived uncertainties about the firm and leads to an increase in its cost of equity capital. Using three models for...

Increasingly adverse climatic conditions have created greater systematic risk for companies throughout the global economy. Few studies have directly examined the consequences of climate-related risk on financing choices by publicly-listed firms across the globe. We attempt to do so using the...