Recent research asserts that an essential feature of good corporate governance is strong investor protection, where investor protection is defined as the extent of the "laws" that protect investors' rights and the strength of the legal institutions that facilitate "law enforcement". The purpose...

We examine three-day cumulative abnormal returns around the announcement of 702 newly appointed outside directors assigned to audit committees during a period before implementation of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX). Motivated by the SOX requirement that public companies disclose whether they have...

We test the assertion that a consequence of voluntarily adopting International Accounting Standards (IAS) is the enhanced ability to attract foreign capital. Using a unique database that reports firm-level holdings of over 25,000 mutual funds from around the world, our multivariate tests find...

We examine the associations among leverage, corporate and investor level taxes, and the firm's implied cost of equity capital. Expanding on Modigliani and Miller [1958, 1963], the cost of equity capital can be expressed as a function of leverage and corporate and investor level taxes. Based on...

We estimate firm-level implied cost of equity capital based on recent advances in accounting and finance research and examine the effect of dividend taxes on the cost of equity capital. We investigate whether dividend taxes affect firms' cost of capital by testing the relation between the...