In this study, we examine whether emphasized tone in earnings releases systematically predict managers' insider trading activities in the post earnings releases periods and whether managers' choices of tone placement in earnings releases are motivated by opportunistic incentives. We find that, holding constant the net tone of the overall document, managers make more insider sales (purchases) immediately after earnings releases when positive (negative) tone is presented more prominently in the document. In addition, we document that the relation between tone emphasis and the observed insider trading activities is more (less) pronounced when insiders have greater information advantage or when a firm's overall information environment is more opaque (when a firm has better corporate governance). Overall, our findings suggest that managers use narrative characteristics strategically to facilitate their insider trading and achieve personal gains.

Prior studies find mixed evidence about the substitution relation between bank credit and trade credit. In this paper, using two bank interest rate deregulations in China, we revisit the substitution hypothesis by examining how exogenous increases in the availability of bank credit affect trade credit. We find that firms with higher credit risk increased their use of bank credit and reduced their use of trade credit after the 2004 bank interest rate ceiling deregulation, whereas firms with lower credit risk increased their use of bank credit and reduced their use of trade credit after the 2013 bank interest rate floor deregulation. Our results provide supportive evidence for the substitution hypothesis that firms reduce their use of trade credit after the relaxation of bank credit and suggest that bank credit is more favorable short-term financing than trade credit.

This study identifies a new economic benefit of common institutional ownership, which refers to the increasingly contentious phenomenon of U.S. firms sharing stockholders with their industry competitors. We find a significantly negative relation between common ownership and insider trading profitability. The disciplinary effect of common ownership on opportunistic insider trading is particularly evident when the information effects of common ownership are greater, when common owners are more likely to benefit from positive governance externalities, and in the subset of trades made by opportunistic insiders. Using the exogenous variations in common ownership induced by financial institution mergers, we conduct a difference-in-differences analysis and find consistent results. We also provide evidence that common owners encourage firms to impose ex-ante restrictions on insider trading and take ex-post actions to discipline opportunistic insiders by voting against management. Overall, our findings suggest that common institutional shareholders have information advantages, governance incentives, and effective means to constrain opportunistic insider trading.

Abstract This paper presents new evidence on the economic benefits arising from common institutional ownership. We find a negative and significant effect of common institutional ownership on stock price crash risk. This effect is robust to a battery of robustness checks and is causal according to some identification tests, including difference‐in‐differences analyses on financial institution mergers. We find evidence that the negative effect is attributable to the monitoring role of common institutional owners—a role that is enabled by common owners' lower information processing cost and greater monitoring incentives owing to governance externalities. We also find that common owners negatively influence crash risk through constraining bad news hoarding and that common owners are more likely to force CEO turnover when a firm has higher crash risk. Overall, our results suggest that common institutional shareholders play a unique and effective monitoring role that fends off stock price crashes.

This paper investigates whether banking liberalization affects corporate tax planning by exploiting China's two interest rate deregulations as quasi-natural experiments. We find that firms reduce their level of tax avoidance following banking liberalization and that the identified effect is concentrated in firms with more bank borrowing after liberalization, firms located in non-financial centers, as well as non-SOE firms and firms with fewer political connections. In addition, we find that firms reduce their use of related party transactions and tax-related bribery after banking liberalization. Our results suggest that firms engage in less tax avoidance with more available/cheaper external financial resources and that, on average, the costs of engaging in tax avoidance are higher than the costs of borrowing from banks.