Knowledge that Transforms

We predict that institutional investors in loan syndicates charge bellwether firms lower loan spreads as compensation for having access to private information that can help identify trading opportunities in other firms' public market securities. Consistent with this prediction, when lending to bellwether firms, institutional investors charge a loan premium that is between 17 and 25 bps lower relative to non-bellwether firms, and earn annualized excess returns of 1.5–2.2% from trading in other firms' securities. Findings from cross-sectional analyses reveal that the reduction in loan spread is larger when the value of private information from bellwether firms is higher. Additionally, institutional lenders' excess returns are lower when lending to more transparent bellwether borrowers and when they pay a lower price—as reflected in loan spreads—in exchange for the private information, supporting the notion that the value of private information relates to institutional investors’ trading performance.

We find that the adverse impact of bad news on analysts’ valuations is 57% larger when the CEO is Non-White, resulting in more pessimistic valuations for Non-White CEOs relative to their White counterparts. Non-White CEO firms are more likely to surpass analysts’ valuation targets in the subsequent 12 months, suggesting that this racial gap lacks economic justification. To provide further evidence of a racial bias: (1) we triangulate our empirical findings with corroborating evidence from a controlled experiment and (2) we provide evidence that analysts’ valuation disparities towards Non-White CEO firms become larger when race relations are worse. Increases in CEO familiarity attenuate these disparities, suggesting the bias we document appears to be subconscious. Our findings suggest that resources allocated towards educating a firm’s stakeholders about the potential impact of implicit racial biases and increasing self-awareness may be impactful in promoting equality within capital markets.

This study explores the relationship between executive compensation and the preference dynamics of managers and shareholders. Our analysis centers on the theoretical prediction that changes in firms' asset value can differentially affect the risk-taking preferences of the two groups, potentially influencing the optimal compensation policy. Utilizing local real estate price changes to identify variations in firms’ asset value, we find that a decrease in asset value leads to more risk-taking incentives in compensation, and this effect is more pronounced in firms that are more likely to be influenced by the hypothesized mechanisms. In the second empirical setting, we provide corroborating evidence using a natural experiment involving disaster-induced negative shocks to the firm fundamentals. Collectively, our findings suggest that the design of compensation contracts facilitates incentive alignment by incorporating the dynamic preferences of the contracting parties.

Prior research concludes that tax-expert auditors facilitate tax aggressiveness. However, these studies examine auditors who also provide non-audit tax services to their clients, creating conflicting incentives. We predict that tax-expert auditors, who do not provide non-audit tax services, reduce tax aggressiveness, because tax aggressiveness imposes costs on them. We test our prediction using Chinese data, allowing us to identify Certified Tax Agents as tax-expert auditors. We find that companies are less tax aggressive when their signatory auditor is a tax-expert who does not provide non-audit tax services. Consistent with a causal relation, a decrease in tax rates, which reduces clients’ incentives to be tax aggressive, weakens the effect of tax-expertise on tax aggressiveness. Moreover, tax-expert auditors attenuate the type of tax aggressiveness that results in tax-related misstatements. Overall, by examining auditors who do not provide non-audit tax services, we find that tax-expert auditors curb tax aggressiveness, contrary to prior research.

We examine how generalist CEOs influence innovation outcomes across 25 countries from 2001 to 2019. We assemble a novel, extended dataset of generalist CEOs and find that generalist CEOs positively affect innovation, particularly in countries with abundant innovation resources. This finding aligns with the notion that generalist CEOs leverage their broad knowledge and cross-industry experience to integrate resources across institutional environments, thereby fostering innovation activities. However, in countries with stricter patent systems, the increased need for specialized knowledge and resources limits the value that generalist CEOs can contribute, leading to decreased innovation activities. Our research highlights how institutional environments shape the efficacy of CEO human capital in driving innovation, thus offering insights for the design of innovation policies that maximize leadership potential across different institutional contexts.

Ratings shopping is a well-documented cause for ratings inflation by credit rating agencies (CRAs). Its unobservability makes it difficult for market participants to undo it. In this paper, we exploit a unique regulation in India that requires CRAs to disclose ratings that were solicited but were eventually rejected by issuers. This regulation, which aims to enhance the transparency in the ratings process, allows us to empirically examine whether these disclosures influence ratings shopping and, consequently, ratings inflation. We find that the disclosure requirements result in an increase in the incidence of future downgrades and type 1 errors and a decrease in the occurrence of type 2 errors. These results are consistent with the view that the enhanced disclosure requirement did not reduce shopping and instead led to unintended consequences, such as an increase in implicit shopping, where issuers selectively engage lenient CRAs to obtain favorable ratings.

This study examines whether an increase in the transparency of investment transactions facilitates portfolio mimicking. While there are reported benefits of transparency in enhancing regulatory monitoring and discipline, an increase in the transparency of investment transactions can also facilitate mimicking of peer firms’ investment strategies. I exploit an exogenous increase in the broad dissemination of transaction-level investment disclosures of U.S.-based insurers and find a significant increase in portfolio similarity at the individual security level. Increases in portfolio similarity are more pronounced in smaller, less sophisticated insurers mimicking their larger, more sophisticated peers. Shared asset positions and common exposures to risk can exacerbate collective risk across firms. Accordingly, I find that the detectable increases in portfolio similarity are positively associated with measures of systemic risk, especially in those smaller insurers mimicking their peers. This study adds to a nascent literature on portfolio mimicking and highlights a potential negative externality of increased transparency.

This paper examines the corporate investment effect of a time limit on the use of net operating losses (NOLs). We predict that when countries limit the use of NOLs to a few years instead of allowing indefinite use, managers of loss-making firms have an incentive to increase investments to utilize NOLs before they expire. Using exogenous shocks to profitability from two earthquakes in Italy and variation in the tax treatment of NOLs over time, we find support for this prediction: when the use of NOLs is time-restricted, firms facing losses increase investment. Moreover, this effect is more significant for firms with shorter investment horizons and those in more profitable industries. We provide external validity for this finding using a large panel of firms from European Union countries exploiting variation in tax regimes. These results indicate that restricting loss offsets can increase investments of loss-making firms.

This paper examines which municipal disclosures provide informational value to investors. Using the entire universe of post-issuance financial and event disclosures from 2009 to 2022, we find that most municipal bonds do not trade in the weeks following a disclosure. However, some disclosures do provide enough new information to increase trading. Investors trade more on credit-relevant disclosures, such as adverse credit event disclosures, and less on required annual financial statements. Trading after disclosures also increases more when a bond is large or risky. Moreover, we find that credit rating agencies respond to disclosures, lending support to the idea that some disclosures have informational value. In further analyses, we find that trading before the disclosure, lack of timeliness, illiquidity, and information processing constraints contribute to the limited trading on the average disclosure. The findings suggest that reconsidering a one-size-fits-all approach to regulating post-issuance municipal disclosures may be worthwhile.

We investigate whether consistent non-GAAP reporting is associated with investment efficiency. Prior research finds a positive association between non-GAAP reporting and investment levels, concluding that it represents overinvestment. We corroborate this positive association, but additional tests are not consistent with the conclusion of inefficient overinvestment. Specifically, we explore the relation between investment and future cash flows as a proxy for the realization of investments in positive net present value projects. We find that the investments of firms that consistently report non-GAAP metrics are associated with similar or higher future cash flows than the investments of firms reporting only GAAP earnings, which is consistent with efficient investment. We observe similar associations in multiple specifications, performance horizons, and outcome variables, including future returns and earnings. Given the prevalence of non-GAAP reporting and the SEC's ongoing concern with the consequences of non-GAAP disclosure, our analyses offer timely evidence relevant to this important discussion.