I examine how mandatory extraction payment disclosures (EPD)—a policy solution intended to discourage corporate payment avoidance in the oil, gas, and mining industries—affect fiscal revenue contributions and investments by multinational firms in foreign host countries. Using the staggered adoption of EPD across firms headquartered in Europe and Canada, I find that disclosing companies increase their payments to host governments, decrease investments, and obtain fewer extraction licenses relative to non‐disclosing competitors. These effects are stronger for firms that face a high risk of public shaming, operate in corrupt host countries, and have a high exposure to bribery‐prone payments, suggesting that EPD increases the reputational cost of corporate behavior that could be perceived as exploitative. The resulting reallocation of investments from disclosing to non‐disclosing firms reduces drilling productivity and resource production in host countries, consistent with uneven disclosure regulation distorting capital allocation.

In light of the current debate about the link between accounting and financial stability, we investigate the determinants of procyclical book leverage for U.S. commercial and savings banks. We find that total asset growth and GDP growth are both positively related to book leverage growth. Our evidence is not consistent with the notion that fair value accounting contributes to procyclical leverage or that historical cost accounting reduces procyclicality. Overall, the business model of banks is more important for procyclical leverage than accounting or regulatory risk weights.

We examine how open procurement data affect the competitiveness of award procedures and the execution of government contracts. The European Union recently made its historical procurement notices available for bulk download in a cohesive and user‐friendly database. Comparing government contracts above and below EU procurement size thresholds, we find that, after the open data initiative, procurement officials are more likely to award treated contracts through open bidding. In cross‐sectional analyses, we document variation in the open bidding effect consistent with two underlying mechanisms: (1) increased scrutiny by NGOs and investigative journalists and (2) learning by national procurement regulators. However, treated contracts are also more likely to experience costly modifications because the shift to open bidding introduces rigidity that limits officials’ discretion in selecting suppliers based on private information. Overall, our evidence indicates that open procurement data promote competitive bidding but lead to contracts with weaker execution performance. These inferences also hold in an alternative open data setting.