We exploit the staggered introduction of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board's (PCAOB) international inspection program to examine the role that exogenous shocks to the stringency of public audit oversight plays in shaping U.S. institutional investors' home bias. Analyzing a sample of...

This study investigates the effect of the debtor–creditor relationship on firms' tax planning decisions. We explore the initiation of credit default swaps (CDS) as a shock to the debtor–creditor relationship that attenuates the concavity of creditors' payoff function and reduces their...

This study investigates how regulatory oversight affects the price formation of initial public offerings (IPOs). We provide evidence on the oversight role of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) by examining the effects of comment letters issued by the SEC in the process through which...

This study examines the hitherto unexplored question of whether and how a firm's social performance influences the breadth of that firm's share ownership. We predict and find that firms with higher corporate social responsibility (CSR) ratings attract more institutional investors (especially...

This study investigates whether loosened monitoring from institutional investors affects firm tax planning decisions. We take advantage of shocks to unrelated parts of institutional investors’ portfolios and examine how plausibly exogenous changes in monitoring from institutional investors...

This paper investigates how eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) adoption affects the information advantage of local investors relative to their non-local counterparts. By employing the recent staggered SEC mandates of XBRL as a natural shock, we show that institutional investors' local...

The issuer underpricing hypothesis addresses why IPOs with a Directed Share Program (DSP) are substantially more underpriced and why the issuers are not upset over the additional money left on the table. In support of the hypothesis, we find that both the final size and likelihood of DSP...

Consistent with the hypothesis that equity demand is negatively (positively) affected by CSR concerns (strengths) of the issuer, we find that (1) issuers with greater CSR concerns are more likely to revise downwards the terms (offer price, number of shares offered, and total proceeds raised) of...

This study investigates how credit ratings affect firm innovation. By exploiting sovereign downgrades as an exogenous shock to corporate credit ratings, we show that a sovereign downgrade leads to significant reductions in innovation among firms that have a rating at the sovereign bound ex ante....