Although the enactment of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) received nearly unanimous congressional support, only a few years thereafter its wisdom was increasingly questioned and its supporters had to stave off attempts to recraft the legislation. The financial crisis of 2008 has sidelined efforts...

While boards are known to react to corporate misconduct by removing the executives responsible, little is known about whether the board's response is shaped by the firm's social context. Using the 2006 stock option backdating scandal, in which firms manipulated stock option grant dates, we...

We document that Chinese city officials are more likely to be promoted if firms under their jurisdictions receive less negative media coverage towards their term-ends. Consequently, local officials suppress negative news of local companies at their term-ends. Such distortion worsens the...

We use the process through which insider trading (SEC Form 4) filings are made public to investigate whether media coverage affects the way securities markets assimilate news. To do this, we utilize recent changes in disclosure rules governing insider trades as well as the initiation of coverage...

Does entertainment broadcast media affect equity stock prices? We exploit an exogenous event to identify such media effects, namely, the broadcasting in China of the highly popular TV drama ‘In the Name of People' on March 28th, 2017. The TV show contained a robust State-approved...

We examine the impact of pre-initial public offering (IPO) media coverage on the decision to withdraw an IPO. Using a sample of 2592 U.S. completed and withdrawn IPOs between January 1998 and December 2011, we find that media coverage and media tone are significantly negatively related to the...