We show that firms with a skillful management team tend to disclose more accounting information than other comparable firms. We explore several channels to explain this finding. First, we find that investors treat the disclosure of skillful management team as more credible. In particular,...

Using religious festivals in Taiwan as repeated natural experiments, we examine whether the religious beliefs of individual investors influence their trading behaviors. Based on the assumption that religious festivals draw superstitious individual investors participating and make them feel lucky...

This research analyzes how experiencing a natural disaster influences individual investor trading in the stock market. Exploiting a unique stock trading dataset of retail investors in Taiwan, we determine that individual investors who experienced major natural disasters trade more aggressively...

This study examines the language effect on investing using the Google search records of Chinese- versus English-speaking searchers. First, we find that the attention of Chinese speakers induces that of English speakers, increases abnormal news coverage, and has better predictability on stock...

We identify the endogenous social effects proposed by Manski (1993) in firm R&D spending. By using state-level Uniform Trade Secrets Act (UTSA) enactments as exogenous shocks, we find that focal firms respond positively to peers' R&D expenditure. The results suggest that managerial learning and...

Banks play a unique role in society. They not only maximize profits but also consider the interests of stakeholders. We investigate whether banks consider firms’ pollution records in their lending decisions. The evidence shows that banks offer significantly higher loan spreads, higher total...

We examine whether rival CEOs’ overconfidence influences a focal firm’s research and development (R&D) expenditure. We propose a stylized model based on an R&D competition game with CEOs having a keeping-up-with-the-Joneses preference. Our model predicts that the overconfidence level of...

In this study, we investigate the effects of bank safety-oriented culture on loan contracts. We propose a new measure that derives a bank’s safety-oriented culture from its business model. We provide several validation tests to confirm that our measure can represent the safety-oriented culture...