Leveraged Employee Stock Ownership Plan (quot;ESOPquot;) transactions originated in the 1950s, yet there are still unresolved valuation issues that arise from a complex set of operating expenses, financing structures and contingent claims that are unique to leveraged ESOPs. Although complex,...

Investors typically base executive compensation on performance measures reported by managers and verified by third-party monitors. This paper explicitly examines how compensation influences the reporting behavior of managers and auditors and finds that (1) strengthening the link between pay and...

China's stock market has gone through major structural changes since its inception in early 1990s. In this survey article, we review the empirical literature that document these important structural changes and published in 15 leading accounting and finance journals from 1998 to 2013. In...

We investigate executive compensation and corporate governance in China's publicly traded firms. We also compare executive pay in China to the USA. Consistent with agency theory, we find that executive compensation is positively correlated to firm performance. The study shows that executive pay...

Can voluntary disclosure be used to enhance insiders' strategic trade while providing legal cover? We investigate this question in the context of 10b5-1 trading plans. Prior literature suggests that insiders lose strategic trade value if their planned trades are disclosed. But disclosure might...

The flow of unauthorized corporate information has changed dramatically in the past few years as Internet message boards have moved from the fringe to the mainstream. Employees, former employees, customers, competitors, and investors are all anonymously communicating with one another on message...

We examine whether the equity incentive heterogeneity of the executive team engenders a positive externality by curtailing stock price crash risk. Supporting this prediction, we find a negative relation between the equity incentive heterogeneity of the executive team and stock price crash risk....

Vesting of equity payments to an entrepreneur, which is time contingent compensation, is ubiquitous in venture capital contracts and has been shown empirically to be of economic importance. We show that vesting equity to an entrepreneur over a longer period of time, late vesting, acts as a...

This paper studies the effect of competition on analysts' forecast informativeness. I show that the impact of competition on forecast informativeness is ambiguous in general, and identify the necessary and sufficient conditions under which more intense competition can make forecasts less...

The revised Markets in Financial Instruments Directive, known as MiFID II, requires the unbundling of research payments from trading execution. Using a difference-in-differences research design, we examine whether this regulation achieved its intended objective. We find that MiFID II weakened...