Drawing on the political theory of judicial decision making, our paper proposes a new and parsimonious ex ante litigation risk measure: federal judge ideology. We find that judge ideology complements existing measures of litigation risk based on industry membership and firm characteristics....

This paper uses the enactment of China’s 2007 Property Law (the Law), which reduces the risk of expropriation by local governments, as the setting to investigate the importance of property rights protection for private firm investment. Using propensity score matching and a...

In this paper, we develop FinBERT, a state-of-the-art large language model that adapts to the finance domain. Using a sample of researcher-labeled sentences from analyst reports, we document that FinBERT significantly outperforms the Loughran and McDonald dictionary and other machine learning...

This paper investigates whether and how federal judges’ political ideology affects opportunistic insider trading. Although federal judges are the ultimate arbiters of insider trading enforcement, whether their ideology matters to insiders’ trading decision is unclear because the primary...

The history of the People's Republic of China can be classified into two distinctive periods: Mao's China (1949-1978) and Deng's China (from 1979 to the present). Each period contains a number of sub-periods or phases, and each phase is characterised by one or more major political or economic...