This paper documents a negative effect of institutional cross-blockholding on portfolio firms’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance. Our baseline results show that cross-held firms perform worse in CSR than non-cross-held firms do. A quasi-natural experiment based on mergers...

This paper examines the effect of active attention from sophisticated market participants on managerial bad news hoarding. Using EDGAR search volume (ESV) as a direct measure, we find that, due to the increased cost of bad news disclosure, firms under greater active attention from sophisticated...

By exploiting the staggered change of legal competition environment in 58 non-US countries, we find that firms tend to inflate their earnings when domicile countries adopt stricter competition laws, which supports the pressure effect of legal competition threats. This result is robust to...

By exploiting the local randomness in close-call labor elections, this paper finds a positive impact of labor unionization on firms’ real earnings management, suggesting the pressure effect of increased labor power. In a local regression discontinuity (RD) analysis, firms that narrowly pass...