Using 113 staggered changes in corporate income tax rates across U.S. states, we provide evidence on how taxes affect corporate risk-taking decisions. Higher taxes reduce expected profits more for risky projects than for safe ones, as the government shares in a firm's upside but not in its...

Using 113 staggered changes in corporate income tax rates across U.S. states, we provide evidence on how taxes affect corporate risk-taking decisions. Higher taxes reduce expected profits more for risky projects than for safe ones, as the government shares in a firm's upside but not in its...

We investigate the diffusion of tax planning across firms, and the real effects and sharing of benefits from such diffusion. Using supply chain relationships among firms as a possible diffusion channel, we find that tax planning spreads from principal customers to their dependent suppliers. We...

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...

Using a regression discontinuity design, this study shows that strengthened bank control rights triggered by loan covenant violations lead to an increase in cash tax savings and a reduction in tax risk. This effect is driven largely by firms with more severe shareholder–debtholder conflicts....

This study shows that less readable 10-K reports are associated with higher stock price crash risk. The results are consistent with the argument that managers can successfully hide adverse information by writing complex financial reports, which leads to stock price crashes when the hidden bad...

Using a natural experiment (Regulation SHO), we show that short selling pressure and consequent stock price behavior have a causal effect on managers' voluntary disclosure choices. Specifically, we find that managers respond to a positive exogenous shock to short selling pressure and price...

We provide causal evidence on the agency cost explanation of the demand for high quality auditing. Using brokerage house closures/ mergers as a natural experiment to identify exogenous increases in agency costs arising from information asymmetry, we find that after experiencing exogenous...

Using Regulation SHO as a natural experiment, we show that managers respond to a positive exogenous shock of short selling pressure by enhancing corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance. The positive effect of short selling on CSR is mainly driven by improvements in stakeholder CSR,...

This study exploits the staggered adoption of the inevitable disclosure doctrine (IDD) by U.S. state courts as an exogenous shock that generates variations in the proprietary costs of disclosure. We find that firms respond to IDD adoption by reducing the level of disclosure regarding their...