This study examines the impact of the presence of institutional dual‐holders, whose portfolios hold both loans and equity securities of the same firms, on those firms' voluntary disclosures. Using mergers between institutional shareholders and lenders to the same firms as exogenous shocks to identify firms with institutional dual‐holders that have high relative equity ownership, we document that such firms are less likely to provide management forecasts and disclose fewer voluntary 8‐K items. In cross‐sectional analyses, we find that the reduction in voluntary disclosures is more pronounced when institutional dual‐holders have higher board representation and when firms have lower litigation risk. In addition, we find that firms with institutional dual‐holders provide more private disclosures to their lenders via loan contract covenants. Additional analyses indicate that the impact of institutional dual‐holders on corporate disclosures is driven by both their monitoring and trading incentives.

This paper investigates the impact of the founding family’s presence on CEO turnover decisions. We find that family firms managed by CEOs outside the founding family (i.e., professional CEO family firms) have higher CEO turnover-performance sensitivity than family firms managed by family members (i.e., family CEO firms) or non-family firms. These results are robust to alternative performance measures and CEO turnover definitions. Additional analyses indicate that higher family ownership leads to even higher (lower) turnover-performance sensitivity in professional CEO family firms (family CEO firms). These results indicate that, with regard to CEO turnover decisions, better monitoring of CEOs by family owners leads to the alleviation of agency conflicts, but the power of family CEOs leads to potential family entrenchment.

In this study, we examine whether internal control over financial reporting affects firm operational efficiency. We find that operational efficiency, derived from frontier analysis, is significantly lower among firms with material weaknesses in internal control relative to firms without such weaknesses. We also find that the remediation of material weaknesses leads to an improvement in operational efficiency. Additional analyses indicate that the negative effect of material weaknesses on operational efficiency is stronger for firms with a greater demand for higher quality information for decision making, for weaknesses that are deemed to be more severe, and to a certain extent, for smaller firms. Overall, our study extends the literature by presenting systematic evidence on the effect of effective internal control on operational efficiency and informs the debate over the costs and benefits of the internal control reporting requirements under the Sarbanes‐Oxley Act of 2002.

We examine how short sellers affect long‐run management forecasts using a natural experiment (Regulation SHO) that relaxes short‐selling constraints on a group of randomly selected firms (referred to as pilot firms). We find that compared to other firms, the pilot firms issue more long‐run good news forecasts but do not change the frequency of long‐run bad news forecasts. The increase in good news forecasts is greater when the pilot firms have higher‐quality forecasts, greater uncertainty about firm value, or higher manager equity incentives. Overall, these results and the results of additional analyses indicate that the reduction in short‐selling constraints and the increase in short‐selling threat induce managers to enhance disclosures through more long‐run good news forecasts to discourage short sellers.

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.