Using the compensation gap between a CEO and the second-highest-paid CEO in the same Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) as a proxy for local tournament incentives, I document a positive relation between local tournament incentives and firm risk. Specifically, CEOs who face higher local...

Using a news-based index of aggregate policy uncertainty in the US economy, we document a strong negative relation between policy uncertainty and corporate risk-taking. We show that high levels of policy uncertainty are associated with significantly lower future stock return volatility at the...

Skewness preference, the tendency to overweight the probability of extreme tail events, can affect managerial decision making. We find that Chinese listed firms managed by CEOs who experienced a largely unpredictable rare event, namely the outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in...

Employing the news-based economic policy uncertainty (EPU) Index of Baker, Bloom, and Davis (2016) and quarterly data of Chinese listed companies, we find that an increase in EPU raises the average debt-to-asset ratio of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) but lowers that of private-owned enterprises...

The paper investigates the effect of monetary policy uncertainty on stock return volatility. Contrary to the widely accepted wisdom that higher uncertainty leads to higher volatility, we find that monetary policy uncertainty negatively predicts stock return volatility both in and out of sample...

The paper investigates the effect of monetary policy uncertainty on stock market volatility. Higher monetary uncertainty leads to lower stock market volatility both in sample and out of sample. Monetary policy uncertainty matters more for the volatility of big firms, profitable firms and past...