We are living in an increasingly globalized world yet with constant and endless conflicts among countries. While studies have uncovered the impacts of various economic factors and policy regimes on trade and investment, a much less understood issue is whether conflicts among countries have any,...

Firm diversification across unrelated businesses is prevalent in many emerging economies, in contrast to the practices in developed economies. A fundamental difference between these two types of economies concerns with the existence of sound economic institutions including in particular the...

In a natural experiment among former colonies between 1970 and 1999, weak institutions reflected in high settler mortality and French legal origin often increase the likelihood and intensity of local currency and real crises (i.e., those resulting in a drop in real output) amid six global...

This paper studies the relationship between corporate leverage and the ultimate corporate ownership structure, particularly the separation of cash flow rights and control rights. We empirically disentangle the three potential effects of the divergence of control rights from cash flow rights on...

This paper studies the role of insider trading in explaining cross-country differences in stock market volatility. The central finding is that countries with more prevalent insider trading have more volatile stock markets, even after one controls for liquidity/maturity of the market and the...

In this paper, we develop a corporate accessibility measure for publicly listed firms in China based on their responses to outside market participants' attempts to communicate with them (via telephone, e-mail, and online discussion forum), and examine whether the provision of corporate...

We examine whether corporate accessibility to outside market participants can mitigate stock price crash risk in a weak public information environment. We measure accessibility by assessing whether outside investors can assess and communicate with firms via public communication channels (e.g.,...

This study examines how short-sale constraints affect investors’ information acquisition and thereby shape stock price efficiency. We exploit two quasi-natural experiments that relax short-sale constraints in the US and China, respectively. We find that the removal of short-sale constraints...

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to provide an introduction to the reverse mergers (RMs) conducted in the Chinese stock market by summarizing the regulatory system, surveying the literature on RMs and analyzing the major characteristics of 161 RM cases. Design/methodology/approach: This...

This study examines how board leadership structure (CEO duality) affects the corporate governance of corporatized state-owned firms where the state shareholders use these firms to serve both profit and non-profit objectives. We propose that CEO duality will generate a positive (negative)...