Despite a longstanding debate over the pros and cons of imposing legal liability on directors and officers (D&Os), how D&O liability affects corporate innovation is rarely studied. We study this question by exploiting Nevada's 2001 corporate law change that dramatically lowered D&O legal...

While prior studies generally support that equity-based compensation induces CEOs to manipulate financial reporting, there is little direct empirical evidence on how concerns regarding financial misreporting affect compensation design. Exploiting the exogenous reduction in litigation threat...