Financing of and investing in Ramp;D are prone to risks of appropriation by competitors, information asymmetry, and agency problems. Although legal protection of intellectual property (IP) rights at the national level is necessary to encourage investing in Ramp;D, we show that the effective...

Using a unique and rich database of high-technology firms in China, we show that effective enforcement of intellectual property rights at the provincial level is critical in encouraging financing and investing in R&D. Better enforcement of intellectual property (IP) rights positively affects...

One unique feature of the emerging economies in Asia is the rich variation in the development of financial systems and technological sectors across different geographical areas. This unbalanced evolution provides us a potentially more powerful setting to investigate the dynamics among banking...

The relationship between investment bank reputation and the price and quality of bond underwriting services is studied. After controlling for the endogeneity in issuer-underwriter matching, I find that reputable banks obtain lower yields, charge higher fees, while leaving issuers' net proceeds...

Using 1983-2002 U.S. data, we examine whether the quality differentials in earnings forecasts between reputable and non-reputable analysts vary as the severity of conflicts of interest varies. We measure personal reputation using the Institutional Investor All-American (AA) awards, and bank...

We study the relation between mutual fund trades and media coverage of stocks. We find that on average mutual funds tend to trade high-coverage stocks. Meanwhile, funds display substantial cross-sectional heterogeneity in terms of their propensity to trade high-coverage stocks. The more likely...

By reaching a broad population of investors, mass media can alleviate informational frictions and affect security pricing even if it does not supply genuine news. We investigate this hypothesis by studying the cross-sectional relation between media coverage and expected stock returns. We find...

Using 1994-2009 data, we examine the relation between analysts' star status and their recommendation values. For investors with private, advance access to analyst recommendations (e.g., institutions), trading on All-American (AA) analysts' buy and sell recommendations yields significantly better...

This study presents a discriminant analysis-based method for prediction of agriculture drought disaster risk. We selected the Chaoyang city in the Northeast China as the study area. We employed multi-scale standard precipitation index (SPI) to reflect drought hazard. We used the yield losses to...