We exploit the staggered nature of interstate banking and branching deregulation of the U.S. to examine the causal impact of bank competition on corporate socially responsible (CSR) activities. We find strong and robust evidence that bank deregulation significantly and negatively affects the CSR...

We examine the pricing of foreign earnings of U.S. multinational firms in the context of the risk of expropriation and unfair treatment by the government, measured by the rule of law index from World Bank Governance Indicators, of countries in which the international subsidiaries are located....

This paper examines the effect of environmental policy stringency on audit pricing. Exploiting the exogenous variation in environmental policies across 26 countries, we find that firms in countries with more stringent environmental policies incur lower audit fees. The inverse association is more...

We examine how management ability affects the extent to which capital markets rely on earnings to value equity. Using a measure of ability that captures a management team's capacity of generating revenues with a given level of resources compared to other industry-peers, we find a strong positive...

We consider consumer responsiveness to changes in the macroeconomic environment (i.e. product demand sensitivity) to be a systematic industry characteristic useful to studying how industrial diversification adds value. We argue that diversified firms, with the advantages of their internal...