We examine the impact of hedge fund interventions on target firms' strategic behavior, specifically their voluntary disclosure and earnings management strategies. We find a decrease in both the likelihood and the frequency of management earnings forecasts conveying bad news and an increase in...

The rise of stakeholder governance has triggered a wave of legal initiatives to strengthen employee voice in firms. Exploiting staggered employment protection laws (EPLs) across 26 countries, we find that managers facing strong EPLs report more opaque earnings. Exploring the mechanism, we show...

This study provides international evidence that external financing dependence creates incentives for firms to undertake a higher level of voluntary accounting disclosure. For a sample of 856 observations from 34 countries and 18 different manufacturing industry sectors, we document that firms in...

We examine the causal effect of increased oversight by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on the cost of bank loans issued to U.S. cross-listed foreign firms, using the signing of the Multilateral Memorandum of Understanding (MMoU) as a natural experiment. The MMoU enables the SEC...

Financial transparency can affect labor markets directly by mitigating information asymmetries and optimizing the matching of heterogeneous firms and employees (matching efficiency channel) and indirectly through the effect of transparency on firms' capital inputs (capital utilization channel)....

We document that firms have greater earnings similarity, relative to same-city industry peers, as the number of local peers increases. However, we also show that this mimicking behavior creates a false similarity and is achieved by firms reporting higher levels of unexpected accruals. These...