We examine the effect of headquarters’ local religiosity on private bank outcomes. Religiosity is associated with lower risk-taking for public banks, but the unique features of private banks may result in a different effect for private banks. We find religiosity is associated with greater asset risk-taking. At the same time, however, religiosity, is negatively associated with solvency risk and return on asset (ROA) volatility and is associated with higher ROAs and fewer failures. We reconcile these results by finding banks in areas with higher religiosity recognize larger fees from providing additional banking services, likely due to relationships formed from more risky lending. As a result, these banks are more (less) likely to realize extreme positive (negative) performance. We also find religiosity is associated with lower earnings management and increased conservatism. Collectively, our results confirm private banks are unique and religiosity can have a significant, and nuanced, effect on bank outcomes

We examine whether employee welfare practices are associated with future stock price crash risk. Two competing hypotheses were tested: the stakeholder theory hypothesis & the agency theory hypothesis. According to the stakeholder hypothesis, if strong commitment to employee well-being genuinely aims at strengthening the firm's reputation in the market, enhancing the shareholders' engagement, avoiding costly strikes, and boosting the employees' productivity, higher level of employee welfare would be expected to mitigate stock crash risks. On the contrary, the agency theory predicts that, if managers attempt to use generous employee welfare plans to reduce the likelihood that the employees blow the whistle on the management wrongdoings, better employee welfare would likely be associated with higher crash risk. We find robust evidence supporting the agency theory thesis: high levels of employee welfare standards contribute to stock price crash risk. This finding is consistent with the view that employee welfare plans form a powerful strategy that can help managers in their bad-news-hoarding activities (withholding bad news from investors). Moreover, earnings management and the likelihood of whistleblowing appear to be the channels through which employee welfare impacts stock price crash risk. Our evidence further shows that the positive relation between employee welfare and crash risk is stronger for labor intensive firms and industries, in more regulated labor markets, and in less competitive product markets. Furthermore, this positive relationship is more pronounced in poorly governed firms and in countries with poor investors' protection and lower disclosure requirements

Our goal is to understand the extent to which cash-flow properties explain accruals. Using the Dechow, Kothari, and Watts (1998) model, we derive a negative relation between accruals and cash-flow changes, and show that the strength of the relation is linked to negative serial correlation in cash-flow changes. Dechow et al. (1998) also suggest that the strength of the relation between accruals and revenue changes relates to operating cycle length. Prior accrual models have not incorporated these theoretical relations. We show that incorporating cash-flow changes, serial correlation in cash-flow changes, and operating cycle length increases explanatory power of all accrual models considered (i.e., Jones 1991; Ball and Shivakumar 2006; McNichols 2002; Jeter and Shivakumar 1999). We find that incorporating these variables in accrual models also improves specification and power, aids detection of earnings management in AAER firms, and produces a nondiscretionary accrual estimate that better predicts future cash flows and earnings. These results suggest the importance of considering the economic role of accruals when predicting accruals