I study how the disclosure of the liquidity coverage ratio mandated for a group of systemically important U.S. banks affects peer banks' liquidity holdings. I predict that the disclosure mitigates uncertainty about aggregate liquidity risk by providing insight into the likelihood of market‐wide liquidity shocks and specific sources of liquidity stress. This uncertainty resolution, in turn, reduces nondisclosing banks' precautionary demand for liquidity. Using bank business interactions to measure the treatment intensity of the disclosure, I find that more treated nondisclosing banks cut their liquidity significantly more in response to the disclosure. In addition, the disclosure rule was followed by lower overall liquidity and a build‐up of systemic risk, indicating an economically considerable disclosure spillover effect in the aggregate. My paper reveals a new economic force, the spillover effect of mandated liquidity disclosure, that shapes banks' liquidity holdings.

We study the personal credit market using unique individual-level data covering fintech and traditional lenders. We show that fintech lenders acquire market share by lending first to higher-risk borrowers and then to safer borrowers, and rely mainly on hard information to make credit decisions. Fintech borrowers are significantly more likely to default than neighbor individuals with the same characteristics borrowing from traditional financial institutions. Furthermore, they tend to experience a short-lived reduction in the cost of credit, because their indebtedness increases more than non-fintech borrowers after loan origination. However, fintech lenders’ pricing strategies are likely to take this into account.

Do stock prices of publicly listed companies respond to changes in transaction costs? Using the SEC’s pilot program that increased the tick size for approximately 1,200 randomly chosen stocks, we find a stock price decrease between 1.75% and 3.2% for small spread stocks affected by the larger tick size relative to a control group. We find that the increase in the present value of transaction costs accounts for a small percentage of the price decrease. We study channels of price variation due to changes in expected returns: information risk, investor horizon, and liquidity risk. The evidence suggests that trading frictions affect the cost of capital.

Using exogenous shocks on the ability to issue seasoned equity offerings (SEOs), we show SEOs lead to a higher employee skill composition, that is, a lower (higher) proportion of low (high) skilled workers. The decrease in low-skilled workers exceeds the increase in high-skilled workers, resulting in reduced employment at the firm level. These effects are more significant when firms invest more in technology following SEOs and face greater financial constraints before SEOs, suggesting that SEOs relieve budget constraints on technology investments. These findings demonstrate that while external equity financing helps upgrade technology to improve productivity, it has a dark side for low-skilled workers.

This study investigates the impacts of unobservable firm heterogeneity on modelling corporate bond recovery rates at the instrument level. Based on the recovery information over a long horizon from 1986 to 2012, we find that an obligor-varying linear factor model presents significant improvements in explaining the variations of recovery rates with a remarkably high intra-class correlation being observed. It emphasizes that the inclusion of an obligor-varying random effect term has effectively explained the unobservable firm level information shared by instruments of the same issuer and thus results in an improvement of predictive accuracy of recovery rates. The empirical results show that the latent economic cyclical effects have been well represented by firm level heterogeneity, and strong evidence is presented for the normal distributional assumption of the recovery rates. Finally, we demonstrate the choice of recovery rate models may influence portfolio risk with the obligor-varying factor model generating a more right clustered loss distribution than other regression methods on the aggregated portfolio.

We show that information exposure through international business networks enables firms to take proactive measures that benefit employees and potentially the local community. Specifically, in the early days of COVID‐19, firms that have business networks with China and Italy are more likely to be aware of the severity of the disease, and proactively implement work‐from‐home (“WFH”) policies that can protect their employees. Using Safegraph foot traffic data, we find a higher stay‐at‐home ratio before local governments impose lockdowns in zip codes where firms have a larger information exposure. These areas are also associated with a lower spread of COVID‐19. Our main findings are more pronounced when local governments face constraints in quickly responding to COVID‐19 and when firms have a higher WFH capability or have more investors with socially responsible preferences. Collectively, we present evidence on the role of private corporations in mitigating the negative effects of a public health crisis before government intervention.

We examine voluntary disclosure decisions when firms are uncertain about audience preferences and are risk averse. In contrast to classic “unraveling” results, some firms remain silent in equilibrium. Silence is safer than disclosure; silence reduces the sensitivity of a firm’s payoff to audience preferences. Increases in firm (audience) risk-aversion reduce (increase) disclosure. Our model explains why some firms do not disclose earnings breakdowns, executive compensation, or Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) performance when they face diverse audiences, and why they disclose less under regulatory rules mandating that disclosure be entirely public.

We show a positive relation between insider horizon and a firm's corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance. This positive relation is likely driven by good internal governance rather than agency problems. To support a causal interpretation, we adopt managerial career horizon reductions and the rejection of inevitable disclosure doctrine as exogenous shocks to insider horizon. We find that the observed positive effects are stronger when firms have higher ownership of long-term and socially responsible institutional investors, when insiders sign long-term compensation contracts, and when firms face less takeover pressure. We document the real effects of long-horizon insiders using various raw CSR metrics. Overall, our results indicate that insiders' long-term orientation can promote CSR.