We explore the governance effect of short-selling threat on mergers and acquisitions (M&A). We use equity lending supply (LS) to proxy for the threat, as short sellers incentives to scrutinize a firm depend on the availability of borrowing shares. Our results show that acquirers with higher LS have higher announcement returns. The effect is stronger when acquirers are more likely to be targets of subsequent hostile takeovers and when their managers wealth is more linked to stock prices. We conduct four sets of tests to mitigate endogeneity concerns. Finally, the governance effect exists only for deals prone to agency problems.

This paper considers a property law enactment that gave creditors more rights over the assets underlying their secured loans to private firms and gave private firms more protections against the potential expropriation of their assets. We find that this property law enactment led to a significant increase in firm value. We also find that the law׳s impact on value was more profound for firms with more tangible assets, lower internal cash flows, and stronger growth opportunities, and less profound for politically connected firms. Taken together, our findings confirm the importance of property rights protection in enhancing firm value.

We identify an important channel, acquisitions of public targets, via which the governance through trading (GTT) improves firm values. The disciplinary effect of GTT is more pronounced for firms with higher managerial wealth-performance sensitivity and moderate institutional ownership concentration. Firms with higher GTT also have higher subsequent ROA, ROE, Tobin's Q, analysts forecasted EPS growth rate, and lower expected default risk. The effect is stronger after Decimalization. We conduct several exercises to rule out alternative explanations, such as institutional superior information, investor activism, and momentum. Additional tests show that the disciplinary effect of GTT only exists for less financially-constrained firms and non-all-cash M&As where the agency problem is more likely to be prevalent.

ABSTRACT Tax evasion is a widespread phenomenon across the globe and even an important factor in the ongoing sovereign debt crisis. We show that firms in countries with better credit information–sharing systems and higher branch penetration evade taxes to a lesser degree. This effect is stronger for smaller firms, firms in smaller cities and towns, firms in industries relying more on external financing, and firms in industries and countries with greater growth potential. This effect is robust to instrumental variable analysis, controlling for firm fixed effects in a smaller panel data set of countries, and many other robustness tests.

The disciplinary role of the financial market could interact with a firm's choice of internal corporate governance. We prove that when the efficiency of the initial public offering (IPO) pricing improves, entrepreneurs choose stronger corporate governance structures as way of committing to extract fewer private benefits in exchange for higher prices. Using a difference-in-difference method that exploits the asymmetric impacts of the IPO pricing deregulation on the Chinese mainland and Hong Kong markets, we find that improving the efficiency of IPO pricing has a positive impact on a firm's corporate governance quality. This impact is more pronounced for firms with lower tangibility, for firms with higher market-to-book ratios, and for state-owned enterprises. Our findings demonstrate that the development of the financial market can promote economic development through improving corporate governance.

ABSTRACT We study whether cross‐country differences in regulations have affected international bank flows. We find strong evidence that banks have transferred funds to markets with fewer regulations. This form of regulatory arbitrage suggests there may be a destructive “race to the bottom” in global regulations, which restricts domestic regulators’ ability to limit bank risk‐taking. However, we also find that the links between regulation differences and bank flows are significantly stronger if the recipient country is a developed country with strong property rights and creditor rights. This suggests that, while differences in regulations have important influences, without a strong institutional environment, lax regulations are not enough to encourage massive capital flows.

Looking at a sample of nearly 2,400 banks in 69 countries, we find that stronger creditor rights tend to promote greater bank risk taking. Consistent with this finding, we also show that stronger creditor rights increase the likelihood of financial crisis. On the plus side, we find that stronger creditor rights are associated with higher growth. In contrast, we find that the benefits of information sharing among creditors appear to be universally positive. Greater information sharing leads to higher bank profitability, lower bank risk, a reduced likelihood of financial crisis, and higher economic growth.

ABSTRACT The primary challenge to assessing the legal origins view of comparative financial development is identifying exogenous changes in legal systems. We assemble new data on Shanghai's British and French concessions between 1845 and 1936. Two regime changes altered British and French legal jurisdiction over their respective concessions. By examining the changing application of different legal traditions to adjacent neighborhoods within the same city and controlling for military, economic, and political characteristics, we offer new evidence consistent with the legal origins view: the financial development advantage in the British concession widened after Western legal jurisdiction intensified and narrowed after it abated.

The recent global financial crisis has spurred renewed interest in identifying those reforms in bank regulation that would work best to promote bank development, performance and stability. Building upon three recent world-wide surveys on bank regulation (Barth et al., 2004, Barth et al., 2006, Barth et al., 2008), we contribute to this assessment by examining whether bank regulation, supervision and monitoring enhance or impede bank operating efficiency. Based on an un-balanced panel analysis of 4050 banks observations in 72 countries over the period 1999–2007, we find that tighter restrictions on bank activities are negatively associated with bank efficiency, while greater capital regulation stringency is marginally and positively associated with bank efficiency. We also find that a strengthening of official supervisory power is positively associated with bank efficiency only in countries with independent supervisory authorities. Moreover, independence coupled with a more experienced supervisory authority tends to enhance bank efficiency. Finally, market-based monitoring of banks in terms of more financial transparency is positively associated with bank efficiency.