A large body of evidence suggests that poor countries tend to invest less (have lower PPP - adjusted investment rates) and to face higher relative prices of investment goods. It has been suggested that this happens either because these countries have lower TFP in the investment - good producing...

We show that the manager of a sufficiently undervalued firm is incentivized to allocate financial slack for a share repurchase to gain an immediate, risk free, and corporate tax free wealth transfer from uninformed shareholders, instead of undertaking a real investment with long term, risky, and...

Using a survey-based measure that directly captures beliefs about disclosure quality (SFARS) in a panel with over 1,000 country-year observations, this study examines macro-level capital market consequences of confidence in disclosure quality. Supporting construct validity, SFARS is associated...

This is the first chapter of the book written Minh Chinh Pham and Quan Hoang Vuong, with the name The Storm. The chapter described the situation of the Vietnamese economy right before the global financial meltdown, which was later sinking many economies and larger conglomerates. The chapter...

The aim of this paper is to investigate the effect of policy uncertainty on firms' investment decisions. We focus on Spain for the period 1998-2014. To measure policy-related uncertainty, we use a new macroeconomic indicator constructed for this country. We find strong evidence that policy...

ASC 842, the lease accounting standard implemented in 2019, requires companies to capitalize operating leases previously disclosed only in footnotes. While the new standard imposes significant changes to balance sheets, the accounting for leases in income statements remains unchanged. Drawing...

We adapt simple tools from computational linguistics to construct a new measure of political risk faced by individual US firms: the share of their quarterly earnings conference calls that they devote to political risks. We validate our measure by showing it correctly identifies calls containing...

We adapt simple tools from computational linguistics to construct a new measure of political risk faced by individual US firms: the share of their quarterly earnings conference calls that they devote to political risks. We validate our measure by showing it correctly identifies calls containing...

Using the policy uncertainty index of Baker, Bloom, and Davis (2013), we document a strong negative relationship between firm-level capital investment and the aggregate level of uncertainty associated with future policy and regulatory outcomes. More importantly, we find evidence that the...