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...

Using a large sample of U.S. firms for the period 1993-2009, we provide evidence that the sensitivity of a chief financial officer's (CFO) option portfolio value to stock price is significantly and positively related to the firm's future stock price crash risk. In contrast, we find only weak...