Corporate and securities laws are seen to mitigate corporate fraud by 'manipulating the incentives of agents': presenting corporate agents with a probability of being caught and punished if they commit fraud. This article suggests that the same laws also affect corporate fraud in a significant...

In 2001, Nevada significantly limited the personal legal liability of corporate officers and directors. We use this exogenous shock to implement a differences-in-differences design that examines the impact of officer and director litigation risk on agency costs. We find decreased firm value,...

Research on the statutory license for certain types of copyright-protected content has revealed an unlikely symbiosis between uncertainty and efficiency. Contrary to received wisdom, which tells us that in order to increase efficiency, we must increase stability, this Article will show that...

We examine how firm characteristics, particularly the degree of firm complexity and the firm's need for specialty knowledge, affect the relationship between corporate governance and the risk of bankruptcy. We find that having larger boards reduces the risk of bankruptcy only for complex firms....

We investigate the relationship between bankruptcy risk and expected future sales growth for Norwegian non-listed firms for the period 1988-2007. We find that firms with high bankruptcy risk also have high expected future growth. Financial ratios characterizing firms with high bankruptcy risk...

This paper offers a novel framework, combining firm operational risk, IPO pricing risk, and market risk, to model IPO failure risk. By analyzing nearly a thousand variables, we observe that prior IPO failure risk models have suffered from a major missing-variable problem. Evidence reveals...

I use the global crisis of 1914 as a window onto the phenomenon of investor reaction to complex news — such as sudden political upheaval. Based on a novel database of all stocks traded on the NYSE during 1914, along with “real-time” news accounts from major newspapers, I show that NYSE...

This paper examines the liquidity, Tobin's Q, and cost of equity effects from voluntary and mandatory IFRS adoption. In contrast to prior work, we focus on the firm level heterogeneity in the economic consequences, recognising that the level of uncertainty avoidance (UAI) in a country will...