We study the effect of executives’ pledges of integrity on firms’ financial reporting outcomes by exploiting a 2016 regulation that requires holders of Dutch professional accounting degrees to pledge an integrity oath. We identify chief executive officers (CEOs) and chief financial officers...

We study whether firms avoid financial disclosures to preserve the financial privacy of their owners. We find that firms named after their owner, where firm disclosure would more directly expose owner information, are more opaque. Eponymous owners prefer firm opacity especially in rural and...

Firms coordinate their actions with industry peers, thereby affecting product market competition. Using the cartel setting, we investigate how financial reporting transparency affects industry coordination. Economic theory predicts that transparency might either prolong cartel duration through...

Investors increasingly rely on digital infrastructure to acquire information and we study how a large, unexpected server outage of the SEC’s EDGAR system affects liquidity to characterize the resilience and capital market effect of information acquisition in the digital age. The SEC’s EDGAR...

Taking advantage of the implementation of the European Commission directives on the financial reporting of private firms, we explore the impact of mandatory financial disclosure on mergers and acquisitions. We find robust evidence that the volume of private firms becoming the target in M&A deals...

We investigate how auditor alignment, i.e. parent and subsidiary are audited by auditors from the same audit firm network, affects the quality of the internal information environment of groups and their subsidiaries decision making and performance management processes. We predict that auditor...

This paper examines if and how mass media enhances entrepreneurial activities. Specifically, we use the staggered introduction of the television show Dragons' Den, also known as Shark Tank, across countries to analyze the impact of mass media on entrepreneurial activity. The show consists of...