We hypothesize that short selling has a disciplining role vis-à-vis firm managers that forces them to reduce earnings management. Using firm-level short-selling data for thirty-three countries collected over a sample period from 2002 to 2009, we document a significantly negative relationship between the threat of short selling and earnings management. Tests based on instrumental variable and exogenous regulatory experiments offer evidence of a causal link between short selling and earnings management. Our findings suggest that short selling functions as an external governance mechanism to discipline managers.

We investigate whether the media plays a role in corporate governance by disseminating news. Using a comprehensive data set of corporate and insider news coverage for the 2001–2012 period, we show that the media reduces insiders’ future trading profits by disseminating news on prior insiders’ trades available from regulatory filings. We find support for three economic mechanisms underlying the disciplining effect of news dissemination: the reduction of information asymmetry, concerns regarding litigation risk, and the impact on insiders’ personal wealth and reputation. Our findings provide new insights into the real effect of news dissemination.

This paper investigates whether foreign institutional investors affect the global convergence of financial reporting practices. Using several measures of reporting convergence, we show that U.S. institutional ownership is positively associated with subsequent changes in emerging market firms’ accounting comparability to their U.S. industry peers. We identify this association using an instrumental variable approach that exploits exogenous variation in U.S. institutional investment generated by the JGTRRA Act of 2003. Further, we provide evidence of a specific mechanism—the switch to a Big Four audit firm—through which U.S. institutional investors affect reporting convergence. Finally, we show that, for emerging market firms, an increase in comparability to U.S. firms is associated with an improvement in the properties of foreign analysts’ forecasts.

We hypothesize that short selling has a disciplining role vis-à-vis firm managers that forces them to reduce earnings management. Using firm-level short-selling data for thirty-three countries collected over a sample period from 2002 to 2009, we document a significantly negative relationship between the threat of short selling and earnings management. Tests based on instrumental variable and exogenous regulatory experiments offer evidence of a causal link between short selling and earnings management. Our findings suggest that short selling functions as an external governance mechanism to discipline managers.

Motivated by the pioneering study of Morck, Yeung, and Yu (2000), this paper investigates whether and how news commonality varies according to a country׳s institutional environments. Using a unique global news data set across 41 countries for the 2000–2009 period, we document three notable findings. First, firm-level news comoves more in countries with weaker institutional environments than in those with stronger institutional environments. Second, news commonality is positively associated with both stock return comovement and stock liquidity commonality. Third, the effect of news commonality on stock return and liquidity comovement is higher in countries with stronger institutions than in those with weaker institutions. These results suggest that a country׳s institutional environments affect firm-specific information production and, more importantly, support the information-efficiency view that lower price synchronicity is caused by greater capitalization of firm-specific information.

This paper investigates the impact of international political risk on government bond yields in 34 debtor countries using a comprehensive database of 109 international political crises from 1988 through 2007. After employing the total number of international political crises as a proxy for political risk and controlling for country-specific economic conditions, we establish a positive and significant link between international political risk and government bond yields. This is consistent with global bond investors demanding higher returns at times of high political uncertainty. In addition, we show that international political risk has a reduced adverse effect on bond prices when the debtor country has a stable political system and strong investor protection.