We examine the impact of foreign corruption regulation on economic development in highcorruption-risk areas. We find that, after a mid-2000s increase in enforcement of the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), economic activity (measured by nighttime luminosity) in African communities within...

We examine how equity-market frictions that restrict pessimistic trading, such as short-sale constraints, affect assessments of default risk. We find that these frictions decrease the usefulness of equity-market variables for identifying defaulting firms but increase their usefulness for...

We study a previously under-explored channel through which firms can exert influence over foreign governments’ policy-making—investor-state dispute settlement—and provide descriptive evidence of firms’ economic incentives. Guided by a theory on firms’ regulatory challenges, we find...

We investigate the effect of cross-border regulatory cooperation in the enforcement of securities laws on global-mutual-fund portfolio allocations. Our research design exploits a shock to the Securities and Exchange Commission's oversight of foreign firms cross-listed on a US stock exchange...

This paper investigates whether foreign institutional investors affect the global convergence of financial reporting practices. Using several measures of reporting convergence, we show that U.S. institutional ownership is positively associated with subsequent changes in emerging market firms'...