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...

This study examines the effect of litigation risk on the readability of corporate financial reports using the 1999 Silicon Graphics Inc. court ruling as a natural experiment. This ruling unexpectedly reduced the litigation risk of firms located in the states of the Ninth Circuit Court (treated...