<heading id="h1" level="1" implicit="yes" format="display">ABSTRACT</heading>This paper examines whether a country's corporate transparency environment, which includes the quality of accounting information, contributes to efficient resource allocation. Based on a cross-country study of 37 manufacturing industries in 37 countries, we provide three pieces of...

Prior research contends that weak legal regimes discourage lender enforcement of contracts by making it either costly or ineffective. However, Diamond observes that this lender passivity can be overcome by structuring debt as a short-term loan. His argument is that an arrival of bad news in the...

Prior research posits that market imperfections and the lack of institutions that protect investor interests create a divergence between the cost of internal and external funds, thereby constraining firms' ability to fund investment projects through external financing. Financial constraints...

Extant theoretical research posits that information asymmetry and agency issues affect the cost of external financing and hence impact the ability of firms to finance their growth opportunities. In contrast, the literature on disclosure policy posits that expanded and credible disclosure lowers...

Extant research argues that borrowing from financial intermediaries subjects managers to external monitoring. However, given managers' flexibility in choosing the type of debt financing, why would managers submit themselves to external monitoring? Recent theory points to the role of managerial...

"According to theory, comovement in stock prices reflects comovement in the fundamental factors underlying the values of stocks. Recent theory contends that stock price comovement can be driven by information markets or the informational opacity of the firm. To the extent that voluntary...

This paper investigates voluntary adoptions of International Accounting Standards (IAS) by private enterprises, and builds on prior research which posits that higher quality financial reports through IAS adoption can reduce information asymmetry and facilitate contracting with external parties....

This study investigates the impact of foreign investors on the informational efficiency of stock prices in local markets. Using a large sample of Japanese firms over the period 1976 to 2008, we find that prices deviate less from a random walk for stocks with a large change in foreign ownership....

This study investigates the relation between large foreign ownership (LFO) and the informativeness of stock prices in 40 markets. We show that LFO is positively related to price informativeness, measured by probability of informed trading (PIN) and price non-synchronicity (NONSYNC) which...