Employing the news-based economic policy uncertainty (EPU) Index of Baker, Bloom, and Davis (2016) and quarterly data of Chinese listed companies, we find that an increase in EPU raises the average debt-to-asset ratio of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) but lowers that of private-owned enterprises...

Exploring the turnovers of city heads in China, I find that local policy uncertainty can encourage firm innovation. This positive relation is concentrated in state-owned enterprises (SOEs), which possess competitive advantages (especially resource-based) due to innate government connections....

Exploiting the staggered removal of short-sale bans in China, we document unintended real effects of allowing short selling in an emerging market featured by concentrated ownership and weak investor protection. Pilot firms have worse short-term and long-term market performances after the removal...

Institutional investors’ common blockholdings within an industry produce an information advantage, allowing them to differentiate between the industry-wide and firm-specific nature of bad news released by peer firms and avoiding selling on false spillover signals (i.e., “panic exit”),...

We document that an increased likelihood of losing important stakeholders like key talents can lead to a higher stock price crash risk. Our test exploits U.S. state courts’ staggered rejections of the inevitable disclosure doctrine (IDD), which improves the ability of key talent to switch...

We examine how waiving managers’ duty of loyalty affects the discharge of their duty of care in view of firms’ acquisition decisions. Exploiting the staggered introduction of Corporate Opportunity Waivers (COWs) that allow boards to waive their managers’ duty of loyalty, in a...

We highlight that the inalienable nature of human capital can crucially determine corporate payouts. Exploiting the staggered rejections of the inevitable disclosure doctrine (IDD) across 15 U.S. states as exogenous shocks that potentially increase the mobility of key talents, we find that...

Using a comprehensive firm-level and a unique confidential loan-level combined dataset, we examine the credit reallocation effects of minimum wage hikes in China. We show that in response to a wage rise shock, firms, especially those that are labor-intensive, are less likely to obtain a loan....

In this paper, we establish a causal link between fluctuations in the stock market and credit risks from the P2P lending market, by exploring information of more than 450 thousand loans on Renrendai.com, a leading Chinese P2P crowd lending platform. Based on the fact that retail investors...

We revisit the research question centering around the impact of the market for corporate control on stock price crash risk. Using a newly-developed takeover index from Cain, McKeon, and Solomon (2017) that comprehensively considers existing state takeover laws, federal statutes, and state court...