This study constructs a novel measure that aims to capture face-to-face private communications between firm managers and sell-side analysts by mapping detailed, large-volume taxi trip records from New York City to the GPS coordinates of companies and brokerages. Consistent with earnings releases...

We examine the relation between short-sale constraints and stock price crash risk. To establish causality, we take advantage of a regulatory change from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)'s Regulation SHO pilot program, which temporarily lifted short-sale constraints for randomly...

The SEC's emphasis on the use of plain English is designed to make disclosures more readable and more informative. Using an experiment, I find that more readable disclosures lead to stronger reactions from small investors, so that changes in valuation judgments are more positive when news is...

This paper contributes to the debate on the consequences of increased disclosure regulation by investigating the effects of expedited reporting requirements of Form 4 filings, mandated by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), on the market response to earnings announcements. We first confirm that SOX...

This paper examines insider trading around first-time debt covenant violation disclosures in SEC filings, and is interesting from a research and regulatory standpoint for three reasons – delay and infrequency of a first-time disclosure, lack of attention to covenant disclosures by regulators,...

We investigate whether market reactions to Accounting and Auditing Enforcement Releases (AAERs) of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) vary with different levels of readability in the AAERs. After controlling for the complexity of an AAER report and the severity of the enforcement...

This paper studies the market-level effects of litigation rights in an imperfectly competitive capital market with a market maker, an information-acquiring investor, and liquidity traders. Litigation rights have the following equilibrium effects. (i) The investor acquires more private...

We investigate the impact of the initiations of national audit inspection programs on firm-specific stock crash risk in 38 countries worldwide. The staggered commencement of the inspection regimes in different countries allows us to identify the causal effect of audit quality on crash risk. We...

This study investigates the effect of a security regulation that occurs concomitantly with International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) adoption on the information content of earnings announcements in Italy. To identify the effect of this regulation, we use a treatment (i.e., Italy) and a...

While it is widely acknowledged that companies face increasing cybersecurity risk stemming from hackers stealing customer information, a relatively unknown cybersecurity risk is from information leakage and subsequent trading by digital insiders – hackers who target corporations to obtain...