Using a corporate lobbying event that led to the unexpected reversal of a tough insider trading blackout regulation in Hong Kong, we examine whether tightening the restrictions of insider trading in family firms-dominated financial markets affects shareholder value. We find that firms more...

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) mandated the adoption of eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) in 2009, with the aim of facilitating data exchange and reducing information processing costs. To shed light on the economic consequences of this important disclosure...

Using a lobbying event that led to the unexpected reversal of a tougher insider trading blackout regulation in Hong Kong, we examine whether tightening insider trading regulation increases shareholder value. We find that repealing the regulation increases shareholder value for the entire Hong...

Despite a longstanding debate over the pros and cons of imposing legal liability on directors and officers (D&Os), how D&O liability affects corporate innovation is rarely studied. We study this question by exploiting Nevada's 2001 corporate law change that dramatically lowered D&O legal...

This study explores the impact of state anti-takeover laws on the governance role of conditional accounting conservatism. Passage of these laws introduced an exogenous shock to the takeover threats faced by firms and constitutes a natural experiment for investigating the relation between...

We examine the determinants and consequences of stock option compensation to directors of state-controlled Chinese firms that are incorporated outside China and listed in Hong Kong, referred to as state-controlled Red Chip firms, over the period 1990-2005. We find that state-controlled Red Chip...

We identify connected auditors as those who attended the same university as the executives of their clients. Using manually collected data from China, we find that connected auditors are more likely to issue favorable audit opinions, especially for financially distressed clients. Moreover,...

Exploiting the staggered state-level adoption of the Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act (IBBEA), we examine whether and how banking deregulation affects firms’ auditor choices. We find that an exogenous increase in the degree of interstate branch banking deregulation...

Utilizing the Trade Reporting and Compliance Engine (TRACE) setting as an exogenous shock to bond market transparency, we find that improved bond market transparency leads to lower crash risk in the stock market, consistent with increased information spillover from the bond market into the stock...

This study examines the relation between narrative risk disclosures in mandatory reports and the pricing of credit risk. In particular, we investigate whether and how the SEC mandate of risk factor disclosures (RFDs) affects credit default swap (CDS) spreads. Based on the theory of Duffie and...