Air pollution is one of the most serious environmental risks and imposes multi-dimensional externalities. This paper examines the impact of air pollution on the efficiency of financial markets. Using a comprehensive set of market anomalies and a composite mispricing score constructed based on...

The Coronavirus crisis has led to unprecedented economic shocks to the corporate world and challenged how corporate management contributes to business resilience amid the pandemic. Employing a novel measure of managerial ability constructed for a large sample of U.S. publicly listed firms, we...

This paper examines the relation between investor attention and stock market anomalies in the US stock market. We find anomalies are stronger following high rather than low attention periods. Returns on the long–short strategy based on a composite mispricing score during high attention months...

This study explores the survival of firms across countries and what factors contribute to their ability to withstand large-scale exogenous shocks, focusing on the COVID-19 pandemic. Using corporate default risk as a measure of non-resilience, our empirical results from 97 countries reveal that...

We examine the role of award-winning CEOs in corporate innovative activities. We find no significant difference in innovation outputs between firms of media award-winning CEOs and a matched sample of predicted winners. However, firms headed by winners of non-media awards generate significantly...

We construct preferences towards risk and uncertainty as reflected in the cultural heritage of CEOs managing public firms in the U.S. We demonstrate that auditors take into account cultural traits of CEOs in the pricing of their audit services. We also show CEO cultural heritage is associated...

We find that cultural proximity between auditors and CFOs is associated with audit quality. We use recent mandated PCAOB disclosures of engagement audit partners to construct cultural proximity between engagement audit partners and client executives. Building on an extensive literature on...

The equity market is more liquid under Democratic than Republican presidencies. This is apparent at the market level but is stronger in small, value stocks and in industries that are more sensitive to Democratic presidents. The effect is robust to different liquidity measures and time periods....

Monthly equity returns in countries with strong governance lead monthly equity returns in countries with weak governance. This predictability is robust to alternative ways of measuring country governance, and holds in and out-of-sample at both the group and individual country levels. Strong...

Using a sample of U.S. stocks over the period 1973–2015, we find that quarterly earnings announcements account for more than 18% of the total maximum daily returns in the top MAX portfolio. Maximum daily returns as triggered by earnings announcements do not entail lower future returns. Both...