Costs are sticky on average, that is, they fall less for sales decreases than they rise for equivalent sales increases. We examine the effect of this asymmetric cost behavior on a firm's dividend policy. Given investors’ aversion to dividend cuts, we predict that firms with higher resource adjustment costs and stickier costs pay lower dividends than their peers because they are less able to sustain any higher level of dividend payouts in the future. We find evidence consistent with this prediction. Further, using a regression discontinuity design that exploits variation in labor adjustment costs generated by close‐call union elections, we provide evidence suggesting that the negative relation between cost stickiness and dividend payouts is driven by resource adjustment costs. Our paper sheds new light on the determinants of dividend policy and demonstrates the role of cost behavior in corporate decisions.

Using hand-collected data on the cultural origins of S&P 500 CEOs and their spouses, we examine whether differences in risk attitudes within marriages influence corporate risk-taking behavior. We find that CEOs with more risk averse spouses adopt relatively safer corporate policies. The effect is stronger if the CEO comes from a more collectivist culture , has been married more recently, or shares more responsibilities with their spouse. Together, these findings suggest that the cultural composition of CEOs’ households and their spouses’ risk preference affect corporate risk-taking behavior.

Employing a sample of 4655 U.S. public firms from 1993 to 2017, we document robust evidence that firms with more registered trademarks have a lower cost of equity. We further show that the equity financing cost is lower for firms with better-protected trademarks in difference-in-differences estimation based on the enactment of the Federal Trademark Dilution Act in 1996. In addition, our analysis reveals that the effect of trademarks on the cost of equity is achieved through the informational channel, the disciplinary channel, and the stabilizing cash flow channel. These results suggest that trademarks play an important role in alleviating the equity financing cost, thus clarifying the underlying mechanism that brand equity creates value.

This paper uses a panel of 224,604 Chinese firms over the period 2004–2009 linked with a set of unique city-level financial development data to examine how financial development affects the way corporate inventory investment is financed. We find that financial development enhances the use of interest-bearing loans and discourages the use of trade credit in financing inventory investment. These effects are more pronounced after the 2007 property rights reform, as well as for privately-owned firms, small firms, firms with no political connections, and firms located in coastal regions. Our results are robust to using a variety of different specifications, as well as different measures of financial development and estimation methods.

We study the impact of CEO early-life disaster experience on stock price crash risk. Using a longitudinal sample of U.S. firms, we document that firms led by CEOs with early-life disaster experience have higher stock price crash risk. Our findings are consistent with CEOs who experienced early-life disasters being more risk tolerant, and thus more willing to accept the risks associated with bad news hoarding, engendering formation of stock price crashes. In cross-sectional analyses, we find that the effect of CEO disaster experience is amplified when a CEO has greater equity compensation-based incentives and power over corporate board to hoard bad news. Reinforcing bad news hoarding narrative, we also find that stocks of the firms led by CEOs with early-life disaster experience exhibit stronger asymmetric response to bad versus good news disclosures and are more likely to experience crashes accompanied by breaks in the strings of uninterrupted earnings increases. Further, consistent with early-life disaster experience making CEOs more risk tolerant, we find that firms led by CEOs with early-life disaster experience tend to have higher cash-flow volatility and stock return volatility. Evidence from supplemental analysis suggests that the impact of CEO early-life disaster experience on crash risk varies in a curvilinear manner with the severity of disaster.

We examine the consequences of shifting the IPO offer pricing power from securities regulators to market participants in a representative weak investor protection country, China. We show IPO offer prices relative to reported earnings are less depressed when determined by market participants than by securities regulators. IPO firms are also less likely to select a low quality auditor or inflate the pre-IPO earnings when IPO offer prices are determined by market participants. However, we find no evidence that IPO offerings are more likely to be overpriced when offer prices are determined by market participants. Furthermore, IPO firms' financial reporting choices made at the time of the IPO have a long lasting impact on the firms' subsequent financial reporting quality. Overall, our results contribute to the ongoing debate on the appropriate roles of securities regulators versus market forces in protecting public investors in markets with weak institutional environments.

Consistent with theories on the equilibrium matching between capital structure and employee job risk aversion, we find a robust, positive association between a firm’s leverage and its employees’ family labor income diversification. Higher-Leverage firms also recruit new employees with greater income diversification. For identification, we exploit two policy shocks that exogenously change employee income diversification and firm leverage, respectively. Individual employee-level tests further reveal that workers with differential risk attitudes adjust their job choices and household labor income portfolios in response to significant shifts in their employers’ leverage. Finally, human bankruptcy costs contribute to the general level of corporate risk-taking.

We investigate the price reaction of listed companies in response to blockchain-related announcements. The average abnormal return based on a global sample of 713 firm announcements is approximately 5% on the announcement day, with significantly higher returns for U.S. firms, smaller firms and announcements in late 2017 and early 2018. We show that abnormal returns are linked to the performance of bitcoin. Additionally, speculative announcements exhibit higher returns than non-speculative announcements, and blockchain-related Form 8-K disclosures have negligible difference in performance compared to their U.S. peers. Whilst we acknowledge the possibility of a latent variable that affects both the abnormal returns and the performance of bitcoin, we hypothesise that investors have confused bitcoin and blockchain, and used the performance of bitcoin as an indicator of the expected success of the blockchain technology.

Traditional autocorrelation and variance ratio tests are based on serial uncorrelatedness rather than martingale difference. As such, they do not capture potential nonlinearity-in-mean, which could lead to misleading inferences in favor of the martingale hypothesis. This paper employs various parametric and nonparametric nonlinear models as well as several model comparison criteria to examine the potential martingale behavior of Euro exchange rates in the context of out-of-sample forecasts. The overall evidence indicates that, while martingale behavior cannot be rejected for Euro exchange rates with major currencies such as the Japanese yen, British pound, and US dollar, there is nonlinear predictability in terms of economic criteria with respect to several smaller currencies.

While prior studies have examined whether financial analysts affect corporate innovation, there is little research on the mechanism through which this occurs. In this paper, we examine whether and how analysts' questions about innovation during site visits affect corporate innovation. Using a sample of corporate site visits in China, we find that when analysts ask questions about innovation during site visits, firms invest more in R&D in the future. Consistent with knowledge diffusion across firms, this association is stronger when analysts cover more firms in the same industry, when firms share similar technologies as industry peers, and when an innovation‐expert analyst is present at site visits. We also find that analysts' questions about innovation during site visits are positively associated with the quantity and quality of firms' patent applications in the future. Overall, we provide evidence that analysts can affect corporate innovation through their questions about firms' innovation activities.