Recent anecdotal evidence suggests that high litigation risk may induce firms to cut dividends. By comparison, litigation can be an effective governance tool for shareholders to force firms to distribute cash. Therefore, it is unclear how litigation risk affects dividend payouts on average. To...

Investors tend to litigate large stock price declines, i.e., file “stock-drop lawsuits”. Enterprising plaintiffs' attorneys seek to take advantage of the stock market declines that have accompanied the COVID-19 outbreak in early 2020 by filing class action lawsuits. However, it is less clear...

This paper examines the effect of short selling on corporate tax avoidance. We propose a financial constraint view, that short selling triggers corporate insiders' incentive to avoid taxes for funding investment opportunities in emerging markets. Employing staggered short-sale deregulation on...

This paper examines the relation between share pledging and corporate risk-taking in an environment featured by strong government intervention and high information opacity. We find that during the years 2005 through 2015, the level of share pledging is associated with less volatile earnings and...

Using a hand-collected dataset of city-level local official turnover in China, I find that average cash holdings of listed firms decrease significantly upon turnover of city heads, and this effect concentrates in privately owned enterprises. Such effects are more pronounced in firms located in...

Skewness preference, the tendency to overweight the probability of extreme tail events, can affect managerial decision making. We find that Chinese listed firms managed by CEOs who experienced a largely unpredictable rare event, namely the outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in...