We aggregate different dimensions of corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities following the stakeholder framework proposed in Clarkson (1995) and present consistent evidence that CSR strengths targeting different stakeholders have their unique impact on firm risk and financial...

This study examines whether foreign institutional investors (FIIs) help explain variation in corporate tax avoidance and whether mechanisms such as tax morality, investment horizon, and corporate governance underlie the relation between FIIs and tax avoidance. We find robust evidence that FIIs...

This paper studies whether institutional investors influence corporate environmental, social, and governance (ESG) policies and the impact of such influence on firm performance. We use facility-level toxic release data to proxy for a firm's ESG policies. We use geographic distance and the size...

We explore the central role that top venture capitalists play in the IPO underwriting market. We argue that underwriters curry favor with Top VCs, not necessarily issuing firms, because Top VCs have the ability to direct the most business in a repeated game sense to banks that treat them well....

In this study, we investigate whether and to what extent institutional shareholders' political values influence their investees' environmental disclosure and performance. Using employees' political donation data, we construct institutional investors' political ideology score, which higher...

This paper studies the drivers behind the monitoring effectiveness of institutional investors in curbing earnings management in an international setting. We identify three distinct drivers and propose two competing hypotheses: the hometown advantage hypothesis predicts that because of proximity...

Using a sample of 27 countries between 1990 and 2014, we find that banks charge higher interest rates and adjust other contractual features of their loans when lending to firms facing more stringent environmental regulations. Our evidence suggests that lenders' concerns about the increase in...

We examine the effect of shareholder litigation rights on managers' acquisition decisions. Our experimental design exploits a U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling on July 2, 1999 that resulted in a reduction in shareholder class actions. We find that, since the ruling, firms in Ninth...

Firms located in more disaster-prone counties adopt more conservative leverage policies than those in less disaster-prone counties. Compared to peers in the least disastrous areas, firms in the most disastrous areas are less levered by 3.6 percentage points, equivalent of foregoing $13.47...