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.

We examine how political geography affects firms' cost of debt. Local policy risk, measured by proximity to political power reflected in firms' position in the country's political map, is positively related to firms' cost of debt. Employing a difference-in-difference-in-differences (DDD) estimation around presidential elections, we find that firms headquartered in states that become more aligned with the president after elections are exposed to more policy risk and thus incur higher yield spreads. Firms can manage policy risk by engaging in corporate political strategies. Consistent with the view that such political strategies protect firms against uncertainty about future policies, we find policy risk has less of an impact on a firm's cost of debt when the firm makes more PAC contributions or spends more money on lobbying.