We examine whether adding more founding family members as firm owners and/or managers matters to corporate governance outcomes. Based on a sample of 1242 founder-controlled publicly traded Chinese private-sector firms, we find that more such family involvement is associated with lower volumes of related party transactions suspicious of expropriating shareholder wealth. The curtailing relation is stronger when family members own firm shares and/or serve as managers, and are more arm's-length relatives instead of immediate kin of the founders. The intra-family governance effects are stronger when firms are subject to weaker capital market disciplines or have more free cash under insider discretion. The overall evidence is consistent with founding family members' information advantages and ownership incentives making them more robust monitors of managerial decisions than other formal mechanisms, which help enforce shareholder rights in emerging markets.

Using a two-firm dynamic model, we investigate whether firms’ corporate policies are impacted by the peers’ idiosyncratic technology shocks. A firm hit by the positive idiosyncratic technology shock becomes more productive. Thus, it is better off. As a result, its Cournot competitor is worse off. Therefore, their optimal decisions are opposite to each other, leading to negative correlations between corporate policies across the firms. The empirical analysis using the idiosyncratic technology shocks and, to a lesser extent, CEO sudden deaths supports this prediction. Our analysis suggests that mimicking peers who alter their corporate policies due to idiosyncratic technology shocks destroys shareholder value.

This paper investigates the effect of social connections on outside director turnover before stock performance crashes. We find that outside directors who are more connected with managers through social ties are more likely to leave the firm before a crash. The positive association between turnover and outside director connectedness is robust to different model specifications, measures of crashes and turnovers, and sample selection criteria. Moreover, we document that this positive association is moderated by the concentration of the outside directors' social capital within the current firm and the availability of alternative information channels to the outside directors. Our findings contribute to the literature on the supply side incentives of outside directors by revealing information sharing through social connections as a mechanism through which outside directors assess their firms' future performance and make turnover decisions before crashes.

By analyzing a sample of Chinese firms that split their stocks via stock dividends and using proprietary trading data to measure investors' gambling preferences, we find that stock splits raise the stocks' lottery characteristics, making them attractive to gambling investors, who willingly pay higher prices for skewed securities and share firm risk with existing shareholders. Split firms take more risk. Our findings suggest that by attracting gambling investors, stock splits facilitate (large) shareholders to reduce wealth exposures to firm risk and increase the firms' risk-taking capacity. Furthermore, due to the influx of gambling investors and more risk-taking, split firms' return comovement with lottery-like stocks increases, while their market risk decreases, suggesting that stock splits induce fundamental changes to the firms' investor base and risk profile.

We examine how changes in property rights security impact firm capital structure decisions by exploiting a quasi-natural experiment, specifically, the implementation of China's Property Rights Law in 2007 (the Law). Using a large dataset of non-listed firms and a difference-in-differences (DID) design, we examine the Law's cross-sectional heterogeneous effects on firm leverage. We find that financially constrained firms exhibit a significant increase in leverage relative to unconstrained firms after the Law's implementation. Our results are robust to three alternative measures of financial constraint: asset tangibility, ownership structure, and firm size. This finding is consistent with the financial constraint hypothesis that states that lenders are willing to extend more credit to constrained firms given that the Law strengthens creditor rights. Overall, we find that the Law has had a significant impact on firm leverage decisions and that it is particularly important to financially constrained unlisted firms.

This study explores the influence of chief executive officer (CEO) overconfidence on acquirer bondholder wealth in mergers from 1994 to 2019. We find that CEO overconfidence benefits acquirer bondholders. Overconfident CEOs are likely to choose targets with lower return correlations rather than targets with lower risk than acquirers. We further show there is a positive wealth effect during announcement periods as well as firm risk reduction and a positive long-run bond market reaction subsequent to merger completion when overconfident acquirers merge with targets that are less correlated. Overall, the coinsurance effect dominates the liquidity effect on overconfident acquirer bondholder wealth during a merger.