ABSTRACT We examine how options trading affects voluntary corporate disclosure, so that we can shed light on whether managers’ potential learning from the options market induces them to withhold disclosure. We find that options trading reduces the likelihood and frequency of management earnings forecasts, suggesting that firms that have active options trading on their stock make fewer voluntary disclosures. This finding is in accordance with the theoretical prediction that managers strategically reduce disclosure to avoid crowding out informed trading, which can give them informative feedback for their decision making. In support of the managerial learning channel, we document a real effect of reduced disclosure: When managers disclose less, options trading has a stronger positive effect on firm investment efficiency. The more pronounced effect of options trading on management earnings forecasts when the need for managerial learning is higher further supports the learning channel.

We explore the impact of religious norms on the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and firm value. Employing a longitudinal sample of publicly listed U.S. firms, we document that strong local religious norms in the area surrounding firms’ headquarters attenuate the positive effect of CSR on firm value. In cross-sectional analyses, we find that the attenuating effect of strong local religious norms is amplified for firms with heightened litigation risk. We also find that the positive effect of CSR on firm value is amplified for firms headquartered in areas where prevailing religious norms are more tolerant of risk-taking. Further, we find that strong religious norms attenuated the positive association between CSR and abnormal stock returns during the 2008–2009 financial crisis. Taken together, our findings cast local religious norms as an important contextual factor that influences the insurance value of CSR—the protection that CSR affords against stakeholder reactions to negative events.

Using the NOx budget program (NBP) as a quasi-natural experiment, we study how air quality affects the productivity of patent inventors. Motivated by previous studies linking air quality to people's risk-taking tendencies and cognitive abilities, we find that after the implementation of the NBP, inventors located in NBP participating states produce more patents and the quality of their patents increases. These inventors engage more in exploratory innovation and less in exploitative innovation, and they shift their strategies toward risky, high-value innovation. Our findings suggest that risk-taking and cognitive ability are the channels through which improved air quality enhances inventor productivity.

We document that global board reforms are associated with a significant reduction in the underpricing of initial public offerings (IPOs). The effect is amplified for IPOs with greater agency problems and mitigated for IPOs certified by reputable intermediaries, IPOs with greater disclosure specificity, and IPOs in countries with better shareholder protection and stringent financial reporting regulations. Furthermore, global board reforms have led to an improvement in the long-term market performance, proceeds, and subscription level of IPOs and have enhanced board independence in the issuing firms. Our findings suggest that global board reforms have strengthened board oversight in the issuing firms, leading to less underpriced IPOs.

We find that stock liquidity increases stock price crash risk. To identify the causal effect, we use the decimalization of stock trading as an exogenous shock to liquidity. This effect is increasing in a firm’s ownership by transient investors and nonblockholders. Liquid firms have a higher likelihood of future bad earnings news releases, which are accompanied by greater selling by transient investors, but not blockholders. Our results suggest that liquidity induces managers to withhold bad news, fearing that its disclosure will lead to selling by transient investors. Eventually, accumulated bad news is released all at once, causing a crash.

The finance literature offers two competing possibilities on how investors respond to the quality of public financial statements in their pricing decisions. They could collect either (i) more private information to benefit from lower information collection cost, or (ii) less private information because of lower incremental benefits. In this paper, we use the audit setting to examine which possibility prevails. Using the idiosyncratic return volatility as a proxy for firm‐specific information, we show in a sample of 51,559 firm‐year observations for 8,261 U.S. firms spanning the period of 2000–2010 that firms audited by higher‐quality auditors exhibit lower average idiosyncratic return volatility but a higher concentration of it at the time of earnings announcements. Our findings are consistent with the argument that investors reduce private information collection in response to higher audit quality. Our findings are robust to alternative measures of audit quality and idiosyncratic return volatility.

Whether and how credit default swaps (CDSs) affect corporate debt structure remains an unanswered question. We find that firms use more public debt relative to bank debt when CDSs referencing their debt start trading. The results are robust to the endogeneity of CDS trading. Furthermore, the increase in public debt is concentrated in senior bonds and notes, which are the most common CDS reference assets. The effect of CDS trading is most pronounced when bond underwriters take a net selling CDS position and for informationally opaque firms. These findings suggest that the hedging and informational roles of CDSs have real effects on corporate debt structure.

Using federal judge ideology as an exogenous measure of issuing firms’ litigation risk, we document that the initial public offerings (IPOs) of the firms headquartered in more liberal circuits are more underpriced. The effect is mitigated when plaintiffs’ pleading standards are more stringent and is amplified when judges have more discretion in their decisions. The effect is also amplified among deep pocketed issuing firms, while it is mitigated among issuing firms hiring reputable intermediaries in the IPO process. The results of additional analysis suggest that issuing firms located in more liberal circuits are more likely to become targets of lawsuits after their IPOs and that these lawsuits are less likely to be dismissed by the courts and result in larger settlements. Collectively, our findings underscore the salience of litigation risk stemming from the issuing firms’ legal environment in driving IPO underpricing.