​Prior studies of real-activity earnings management (REM) focus on earnings-inflating abnormal activities. We seek to establish the existence of downward REM by investigating several corporate events in which managers have incentives to temporarily deflate market valuations. Specifically, we...

Using panel data for 19 OECD countries covering the period 1986-1995, we find effect of general economic uncertainty on venture-capital investments to be significantly negative. The more irreversible late-stage venture-capital investments are much more adversely affected by such uncertainty than...

We assess the extent to which discretion, unexplained variations in the terms of a loan contract, has varied across time and lending institutions and show that part of this discretion is due to private information that lenders have on their borrowers. We find that discretion is lower for secured...

We analyze how creditor rights affect the nonsynchronicity of global corporate credit default swap spreads (CDS-NS). We find that CDS-NS is negatively related to the country-level creditor-control rights, especially to the “restrictions on reorganization” component, where...