We demonstrate that firm leaders’ personal traits formed from their early life experiences affect employees’ behavior and performance at work. In the context of securities companies in China, we show that chairpersons’ adolescent experience as “sent-down youths”(SDYs) during the...

We examine the impact of a chairperson having siblings on the corporate social responsibility (CSR) of a firm. The findings suggest that when a firm has a siblings-chairperson, the firm has a better CSR rating than a firm with a chairperson having no siblings. The conclusions are robust to a...

China's split-share reform of 2005 (the Reform) converts the previously restricted shares held by founding shareholders to shares tradable on the open market. Against this backdrop, we study how underwriter-affiliated analysts and firms' large shareholders interact in the event of the latter's...

Using a rich database of Chinese firms, we examine the proposition that firms with disproportionately more analysts herding, as measured by a larger herding index value, have higher future stock price crash risk. Our findings are consistent with the proposition and are robust to different...

Basic shareholder rights include control rights, cash flow rights, and the rights to transfer shares. We investigate the impact of the divergence of shareholder rights on corporate risk-taking by exploiting two regulatory reforms in China. First, the privatization of Chinese state-owned...