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...

Exploiting the staggered adoption of anti-recharacterization laws across various U.S. states as quasi-exogenous shocks to secured lenders' ability to repossess assets in bankruptcy, we find that the strengthening of creditor rights is associated with a significant decrease in the cost of equity...

This paper theoretically illustrates and empirically examines how listed non-financial firms use financial assets as an earnings manipulation tool with bad-news-hoarding motives. China created its first accounting standards for financial instruments in 2007, which classify financial assets based...

Based on the evidence after the outbreak of SARS in 2003, which is caused by the same family of viruses as COVID-19, we show that due to the “probability weighting” phenomenon, i.e., decision makers tend to overweight the probability of extreme tail events, the epidemic experience induces...

This study examines the role of institutional common owners on a firm's cost of equity capital. Following the theoretical and empirical literature on common ownership, we hypothesize that common owners could reduce a firm's cost of capital by reducing product market competition and improving...

Exploiting the staggered adoption of universal demand (UD) laws as exogenous shocks to filing derivative lawsuits, we find that weakened shareholder litigation rights cause a significant increase in the cost of debt. Deteriorated corporate governance, increased information asymmetry, and...

Using a unique regulatory change (the enactment of the Labor Contract Law) in China, we find that the strengthening of labor protection leads to a significant increase in firm transparency. Further analyses indicate that stronger labor protection reduces operating flexibility, which can exert...