Massa et al. (2015) show that corporate insiders become more opportunistic by selling more and faster in competition with short sellers. By considering the possibility that short sellers may react to insider trading, we propose a new hypothesis that short sellers play a disciplinary role in...

We measure ex-ante expectation errors by identifying sporadic versus persistent total asset growth ex-ante. Corporate profitability of high (low) asset-growth firms remains inferior (superior) after temporary asset expansion (contraction), hence ex-ante expectation errors are high. Corporate...

We empirically evaluate the predictions of the mispricing hypothesis with limits-to-arbitrage suggested by Shleifer and Vishny (1997) and the q-theory with investment frictions proposed by Li and Zhang (2010) on the negative relation between asset growth and average stock returns. We conduct...

We investigate whether and how firm-level political uncertainty affects firms' bank loan contracting. We find that firms facing higher firm-level political uncertainty are charged higher bank loan costs. This impact is amplified for firms with higher degrees of information asymmetry and firms...

Enterprise bonds with higher demand of retail investors are traded at significantly higher prices in the exchange market than the same bonds traded by institutional investors in the interbank market in China. The price difference is higher for bonds with higher yield to maturity, lower supply,...

The momentum life cycle (MLC) hypothesis first proposed by Lee and Swaminathan (2000) applies also to global markets. Early-stage strategies significantly outperform the late-stage and conventional strategies in most countries. Individualism culture is positively associated with late-stage but...

This study examines the effect of firm-level corporate governance on the cost of equity capital in emerging markets and how the effect is influenced by country-level legal protection of investors. We find that firm-level corporate governance has a significantly negative effect on the cost of...

In this paper, we examine the effect of shareholder rights on reducing the cost of equity and the impact of agency problems from free cash flow on this effect. We find that firms with strong shareholder rights have a significantly lower implied cost of equity after controlling for risk factors,...

The evidence from this study shows that the quot;accruals anomalyquot; and the quot;capital investment anomalyquot; are distinct, even though capital investments and accruals may be related in a certain way. The results also indicate that, after adjustment for the Fama-French three risk factors,...

We examine short sellers' use of textual information in annual reports for shorting activities. We find that more uncertainty and negative words in annual reports are associated with greater abnormal shorting volume. Short selling motivated by textual information negatively predicts stock price...