Knowledge that Transforms

We investigate a 2012 comply-or-explain regulation implemented by China’s Shanghai Stock Exchange. The regulation requires eligible firms to pay 30% of their current-year profits as cash dividends or explain the reasons why they do not meet this requirement through a public conference call. Using firms listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange as a control group, our difference-in-differences estimates suggest that firms subject to the regulation decreased tunneling, irrespective of whether they complied by paying or disclosing. Further analyses suggest that the reduction in tunneling is partially attributed to enhanced regulatory monitoring over explaining firms and the constraint on excess cash of paying firms. These findings offer novel policy insights into how a flexible comply-or-explain form of regulation can mitigate agency costs between controlling and minority shareholders in a weak institutional environment.

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.

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.

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.

We investigate the impact of reporting regulation on corporate innovation. Exploiting thresholds in Europe's regulation, we find that forcing firms to disclose financial statements reduces the number of innovating firms and the average firm's innovation spending, but it does not reduce industry-wide total innovation spending. Our results suggest that the regulation imposes proprietary costs on firms, which discourages innovation activity, especially by smaller firms. We also show that the regulation provides positive information spillovers to other firms (e.g., competitors, suppliers, and customers), especially larger ones. We complement our analysis with alternative innovation measures, including patents, and corroborate the results with an analysis of reporting changes due to an enforcement reform in Germany. In sum, the European reporting regulation has aggregate and distributional effects on corporate innovation. Importantly, it appears to concentrate innovative activities among fewer, mostly larger firms, which could reflect institutional features of our setting or more general economic forces.

This study examines the effects of firms' green innovation on their future financial and environmental performance. If pollution is primarily a manifestation of wasted resources, then investments in pollution prevention technologies can both reduce the environmental impact of production and improve financial performance. In contrast, investments in pollution control technologies likely reduce the environmental impact of production without improving financial performance. Using green patents to capture firms' investments in these two types of technologies, we find that the value of a firm's pollution prevention patents is positively associated with its future financial and environmental performance, and that the positive impact on future financial performance is achieved through improvements in sales growth and cost efficiency. In contrast, the value of a firm's pollution control patents is not associated with its future financial or environmental performance. Overall, these findings shed light on the future implications of green innovation.

I report and analyze a recent “one-size-fits-all” trend in the structure of executive compensation plans. Since 2006, 24% of the variation in the distribution of CEO compensation across pay components — salary, bonus, stock awards, options, non-equity incentives, pensions, and perquisites — disappeared. This uniformity might come at the expense of optimal incentives, as increases in pay structure similarity translate into lower shareholder value. Using panel data regressions and plausibly exogenous shocks, I find that institutional investors’ influence, proxy advisors’ recommendations, and expanded compensation disclosure are salient drivers of this standardization. The findings highlight an unintended consequence of recent regulations enhancing shareholders’ participation and expanding compensation disclosure.

This paper shows theoretically and empirically that the decision to disclose a short-term earnings forecast can reveal managers’ private information about long-term performance. Consistent with the predictions of our model, we find that the decision to disclose a short-term earnings forecast predicts long-term performance for up to three years. The relation strengthens when current period performance is poor, when managers have longer horizons, and when competitive threats are lower. Endogenizing the proprietary costs of disclosure, our analysis suggests that––despite the short horizon––the decision to provide an earnings forecast contains significant information about long-term performance and thus can entail proprietary costs.

In 2017, the European Commission (EC) published a list of non-cooperative tax havens. We study whether country-level tourism and foreign direct investment (FDI) change as a result of this list. Consistent with a reputational cost of the EC’s “name and shame” campaign, there is a modest reduction in EU tourism among listed countries compared to unlisted ones. This relative reduction is concentrated among tourists from countries that view cheating on taxes as less justifiable. In contrast, listed countries experience a general increase in FDI following the list, a benefit potentially offsetting the costs of reduced tourism.