Using hand-collected data on the turnover of mayor and party secretary in 260 Chinese cities, we study the effect of political uncertainty on firm investment. We find that political uncertainty has a negative impact on firm investment. Our baseline results show that firm investment declines when...

Crowdfunding remains a bit of an unknown in business finance. Securities crowdfunding, as a subset of that financing market, is no more familiar. Diverse investors and risks make for a complex regulatory puzzle.Investor protection regulation has begun to develop in a path-dependent manner....

We examine the effects of mandatory ESG disclosure around the world using a novel dataset. Mandatory ESG disclosure increases the availability and quality of ESG reporting, especially among firms with low ESG performance. Mandatory ESG reporting has in turn beneficial effects on firm’s...

Several signaling models predict that firms underprice their initial offerings of equity deeply so that they can subsequently issue seasoned equity at more favorable terms. We test the implications of those models. We find a positive relation between IPO underpricing and the possibility of and...

This paper investigates Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) deregistrations by foreign firms from the time the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) was passed in 2002 through 2008. We test two theories, the bonding theory and the loss of competitiveness theory, to understand why foreign firms leave...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the economic consequences of accounting conservatism in Middle Eastern and North Africa (MENA) economies. In particular, motivated by the lack of empirical tests concerning economic effects of conservatism in MENA countries, the paper examines the...

Foreign firms terminate their SEC registration in the aftermath of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) because they no longer require outside funds to finance growth opportunities. Deregistering firms' insiders benefit from greater discretion to consume private benefits without having to raise higher...

La Porta, Lopez-de-Silanes, Shleifer and Vishny's (LLSV) purported demonstration in Law and Finance (1998) of a correlation between the legal origins of a country and its stock market development and ownership dispersion, mediated through the protection of minority shareholders as against...

Much has been written about the current crisis in the global financial system, and many thoughtful analyses have examined the causes and consequences of that crisis. This paper joins those analyses that argue that the crisis reveals flaws in the theoretical underpinnings of capital market...

We evaluate the viability of credit default swaps (CDS) spreads as substitutes for credit ratings. We focus on CDS spreads based on the obligations of financial institutions, particularly fifteen large financial institutions that were prominently involved in the recent financial crisis. Our...