ABSTRACT We investigate whether CEO power influences a firm's decision to change its compensation system in response to regulatory and public pressure. In particular, we assess whether CEO power influences the choice of performance measures as a form of camouflage to minimize the impact of these reforms on their wealth. We examine one component of CEO pay, namely, the use of performance-vested stock option (PVSO) plans, and find that firms with powerful CEOs attach less challenging targets in the initial PVSOs granted to their CEOs. Such firms also appear to adopt PVSO plans early, and are more likely to do so when faced with public outrage over executive compensation. Our results suggest that powerful CEOs attempt to appease public outrage by quickly adopting PVSOs, but that adopting PVSOs early does not appear to be an optimal strategy for increasing shareholder value. Regulators intended that implementation of PVSOs would be beneficial to shareholders by improving the link between CEO pay and firm performance. However, our results indicate that powerful CEOs can negate some of the beneficial effect of PVSOs through their influence on adoption and choice of performance targets. Data Availability: All data used in this study are publicly available from the sources indicated in the paper.

This study examines the impact of local corruption on firms' narrative research and development (R&D) disclosures in the United States. We find that firms in more corrupt areas include fewer R&D sentences in their 10-K filings, and these sentences contain less numerical and forward-looking information. Our results hold across various measures of local corruption and R&D disclosures and remain robust after controlling for firms' R&D activities, implementing fixed effects, using difference-in-differences tests, and applying instrumental variable analysis. Additionally, the effects are more pronounced for firms with concentrated operations in their headquarters states and for firms whose R&D disclosures closely relate to future earnings. However, they are less pronounced for firms with CEOs politically aligned with the state's incumbent party and when the benefit of resolving market dispersion from firms' R&D disclosure is high. Overall, our findings indicate that local corruption adversely affects firms' narrative R&D disclosures.

ABSTRACT Exploiting a screen display feature whereby the order of stock display is determined by the stock's listing code, we lever a novel identification strategy and study how the interaction between overconfidence and limited attention affect asset pricing. We find that stocks displayed next to those with higher returns in the past two weeks are associated with higher returns in the future week, which are reverted in the long run. This is consistent with our conjectures that investors tend to trade more after positive investment experience and are more likely to pay attention to neighboring stocks, both confirmed using trading data.

Managers often overreact to revenue fluctuations, leading to unnecessary workforce adjustments and increased training costs. This study examines how board governance influences firms’ employment sensitivity to revenue fluctuations. Analyzing global board reforms, we find that board reforms significantly reduce managerial overreaction to revenue fluctuations. Utilizing recent difference-in-differences estimators that address heterogeneous treatment effects, we ensure the robustness of our results. The reduction in employment sensitivity is more pronounced when board reforms strengthen the independence of boards and audit committees, particularly in jurisdictions with weaker board efficacy, shareholder, and employment protection legislation. Enhanced effects are observed in firms with initially lower board independence and rapid reform compliance, in entities experiencing greater information asymmetry, marked by higher labor intensity, higher pre-reform agency costs and financial constraints, and in firms led by less experienced CEOs or boards with higher male representation.

This study shows how professional ties assist directors in gaining future board positions when their reputation is tainted by accounting fraud. We demonstrate that the influence of professional ties is more prominent for directors who are more heavily impacted by fraud. This effect is also stronger when directors share professional ties with key board members in the appointing firms. Additional tests show that appointments of these directors are associated with more favorable market reactions compared to appointments of other tainted directors. We also find that firms’ financial reporting quality improves after appointing professionally connected tainted directors.

Corporations often use affiliated firms as guarantors when issuing guaranteed bonds, thus combining external financing with internal credit enhancements. In this study, we empirically examine the potential determinants of corporate guaranteed debt issuance. We find evidence that issuers with fewer tangible assets, lower credit ratings, more pronounced debt overhang and/or greater managerial agency problems are more likely to issue guaranteed bonds. Moreover, we find that while firms generally issue guaranteed bonds with different motives, alternative incentives for guaranteed bond uses are largely captured by bond prices at issuance.

Taking advantage of the institutional difference in capture between local and non-local media in China, we examined the association between media capture and post-earnings announcement drift (PEAD). Using both portfolio and regression analyses, we found that, for the same firms, non-local media coverage is negatively associated with PEAD; however, there is no association between local media coverage and PEAD, except for non-state-owned firms. Given that in China, non-local media are less captured or more independent than local media, the negative association observed for non-local media coverage can be interpreted as an indication that media independence plays a role in reducing PEAD or improving informational efficiency in the stock market.

ABSTRACT Social ties between mutual funds and the companies in which they invest (investees) can both facilitate information transfers and encourage favoritism. Using the investment choices of mutual funds in China, we compare investment performance of holdings in companies that are socially connected to mutual funds versus those that are not. We find that funds allocate more investment to connected investees' stocks, especially when a fund is weakly monitored. This overweighting is greater in times of poor investee performance, when the benefits of additional investment to the connected investees are high. Weakly monitored funds' preference for connected stocks hurts the returns of these funds, yielding a 6.6 percent lower annualized risk-adjusted return, relative to closely monitored funds. These results suggest that, absent sufficient monitoring, agency conflicts generated by social networks can dominate the information advantages of these networks. JEL Classifications: G10; G11; G14.

ABSTRACT In the presence of litigation-facing suppliers, the supply chain relationship is at risk. Suppliers with principal customers (dependent suppliers) have a higher concentration of sales to customers, and they are more at risk relative to suppliers without principal customers (non-dependent suppliers). As a result, we predict and find that litigation disclosure patterns differ for the two supplier types: dependent suppliers are more likely to delay bad news and accelerate good news related to litigation outcomes, compared to non-dependent suppliers. Such strategic disclosure patterns in our end-game setting are opposite to those documented in the existing supply chain literature for the repeated-game setting (for example, Hui, Klasa, and Yeung 2012). JEL Classifications: M41; M48; K22.

ABSTRACT We examine the effects of city-level auditor industry specialization and scale economies on audit pricing in the United States. Using a sample of Big N clients for the 2000–2007 period, and a scale measure based on percentile rankings of the number of audit clients at the city-industry level, we document significant specialization premiums and scale discounts in both the pre- and post-Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) periods. However, the effects of industry specialization and scale economies on audit pricing are highly interactive. The negative effect of city-industry scale on audit fees obtains only for clients of specialist auditors. By contrast, clients of non-specialist auditors obtain scale discounts only when they enjoy strong bargaining power, suggesting that auditors are “forced” to pass on scale economies to clients with greater bargaining power. Data Availability: Data are available from sources identified in the article.