We investigate the impact of directors' and officers' insurance (D&O insurance) on stock price crash risk. We find that D&O insurance in China is negatively associated with stock price crash risk. This association is robust to a series of robustness checks including the use of alternative sample, Heckman two-step sample selection model, propensity score matching procedure, fixed effects model, the inclusion of some possibly omitted variables, and bootstrap method. Further analyses show that the impact of D&O insurance on crash risk is more pronounced in firms with lower board independence, non-Big 4 auditors, lower institutional shareholdings, and weaker investor protection; and the negative relationship between D&O insurance and crash risk is not driven by the eyeball effect. Moreover, we find that D&O insurance purchase is associated with less financial restatements and more disclosure of corporate social responsibility reports. Our findings provide support to the notion that D&O insurance appears to improve corporate governance.

A large body of accounting research finds that various contracting incentives lead managers to engage in conservative accounting practices. We extend existing research by modeling the impact of extant accounting rules on conservative accounting. Accounting rules typically require assets to be written down when their fair values drop sufficiently below their book values. We document evidence of the resulting non-discretionary conservatism and show that it appears to explain some of the results from previous research on contracting incentives.

We explore the evolution of financial innovation using US finance patents. Patented financial innovations are substantial and increasingly economically important. Their subject matter has changed, consistent with the industry’s shift toward household investors and borrowers. Information technology (IT) and other nonfinancial firms drove the surge in financial patenting. The location of innovation shifted, with banks moving activity away from states with tight financial regulation and high-tech regions attracting innovation by payments, IT, and nonfinancial firms. Analyses of returns suggest that the social value of these innovations is higher than their private value. We present a simple model to explain these trends.

Does pledging movables as collateral alter corporate borrowing? To answer this question, we study the effect of collateral law reforms on syndicated bank loans granted across nine European countries that facilitated pledging movables between 1995 and 2019, comparing them to 19 countries that did not. We differentiate firms in sectors of higher versus lower asset movability to strengthen the identification. We find that although the reforms have enabled firms in movable-intensive sectors to issue more secured loans, the average cost of the loans and the number of covenants have also increased. Channel tests suggest that banks may demand more to compensate for the potential wealth redistribution induced by newly issued secured credit, or the unique risk involved with using movables as collateral.