Abstract There is mixed evidence on whether the marginal dollar spent on corporate social responsibility is due to agency problems. We propose an approach by modeling how the 2003 dividend tax cut, which increased after-tax insider ownership and better aligned managerial and shareholder interests, affected the marginal dollar spent on firm responsibility. We confirm key predictions of our agency model: following the tax cut, moderate insider-ownership firms experience larger declines in their responsibility ratings and increases in their valuations relative to other firms. We also confirm another implication regarding managerial misalignment using a regression-discontinuity design of close votes on shareholder-governance proposals. (JEL G30, G31, G35) Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online.

Using Glassdoor's list of “Top CEOs by Employees' Choice,” we adopt a regression discontinuity (RD) specification to establish a causal link between the employee approval of CEOs and firm value. Having a CEO included in the top list results in an increase in firm performance in both stock returns and return on assets. Having a top CEO significantly increases a firm's employee efficiency, attraction to future employees, hiring of high-quality laborers such as inventors, and attraction to the customers. Our findings establish that the CEO-employee relationship is an important, though intangible, component of a corporation, and we emphasize the critical role of perceived corporate culture in the spirit of Guiso et al. (2015).

In this study, we examine whether emphasized tone in earnings releases systematically predict managers' insider trading activities in the post earnings releases periods and whether managers' choices of tone placement in earnings releases are motivated by opportunistic incentives. We find that, holding constant the net tone of the overall document, managers make more insider sales (purchases) immediately after earnings releases when positive (negative) tone is presented more prominently in the document. In addition, we document that the relation between tone emphasis and the observed insider trading activities is more (less) pronounced when insiders have greater information advantage or when a firm's overall information environment is more opaque (when a firm has better corporate governance). Overall, our findings suggest that managers use narrative characteristics strategically to facilitate their insider trading and achieve personal gains.

Prior literature finds that staggered state-level adoption of the Inevitable Disclosure Doctrine (IDD) significantly constrains labor mobility. Using the IDD as an exogenous shock to labor mobility, we find that firms headquartered in states that adopt the IDD gravitate towards issuing short-term debt for external debt financing. We examine three mechanisms—default risk, information asymmetry, and agency cost mitigation—through which labor mobility restrictions affect debt maturity. Our results provide support for the information asymmetry mechanism, which suggests that firms are more inclined to use short-term debt when their information environment deteriorates. We find that in the wake of IDD adoption, firms tend to utilize short-term debt only in corporate bond markets and their debt maturity profiles become more concentrated.

We document the importance of political promotion incentives for supervisors in banking supervision. Utilizing the merger of the China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC) and the China Insurance Regulatory Commission (CIRC) in 2018, we explore the actions of head of the CBRC's regional offices. We find that the increased political promotion incentives are associated with higher frequency, greater amount, and greater severity of penalties in regional banking supervision. The enhanced supervision is more remarkable when the head of the CBRC's regional offices has a higher political rank. After the merger of the two commissions, the regional banking supervision is significantly weakened with the disappearance of political promotion incentives. Furthermore, these enhanced regional supervision triggered by the merger event reduce bank risk. Our findings show that the increased political promotion incentives affect the supervisor's activities and improve the supervision effectiveness.

We find that dividend paying firms demonstrate superior corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance in the subsequent year than non-paying firms. This effect can be explained by stakeholder relationship management through CSR, as dividend payout reflects the inherent conflict between shareholders and stakeholders. Specifically, for dividend payers, we find an increase in CSR performance after states adopt constituency statutes which encourage board’s attention on stakeholders, supporting a causal inference of the stakeholder relationship management’s effect on CSR. The increase in dividend payers’ CSR around the constituency statute adoption is more pronounced when management is friendlier to CSR, which lends further support for the stakeholder relationship management channel. We find no support for the short-termism view of dividends or the notion that CSR is solely an outcome of agency problems within firms. In conclusion, our findings suggest that dividend payout serves as a mechanism for balancing shareholder and stakeholder interests, leading to improved CSR performance among dividend-paying firms.

Abstract Mutual fund families set and report values of their private startup holdings, which affect the fund net asset value (NAV) at which investors buy/sell fund shares. We test three hypotheses related to the valuation practice: (i) information cost/access, (ii) litigation risk, and (iii) strategic NAV management. Consistent with (i), families with larger PE holdings and/or stronger information access update valuations more frequently in the absence of public information releases, their updates co-move less with other families, and their fund returns jump less at follow-on financings. We find no support for hypotheses (ii) or (iii). We also find that high-PE-exposure funds are subject to greater financial fragility.

We find that the staggered passage of state-level laws that legalize marijuana for medical use increases states' borrowing costs by 7–9 basis points. Consistent with economic theory on substance use suggesting that marijuana legalization increases local consumption of the drug (by expanding its availability and reducing its perceived risks), we predict and find that increased consumption represents an important mechanism that explains the higher state bond spreads. We also show that following such laws’ passage, states incur higher marijuana-consumption-related expenditures, including for police, corrections, and public welfare.

We find that the tail risk of a firm's stock returns is positively affected by the tail risk of other firms held by the same common institutional blockholder (CIB). The CIB peer effect on tail risk increases (decreases) after exogenous initiations (terminations) of peer connections via CIB ownership, consistent with a causal interpretation. Our findings support the disclosure herding hypothesis, which predicts that firms release bad news after other firms’ bad news announcements. In addition, commonality in the real investment decisions of a firm and its CIB peers, along with the common trading pressure of these firms, contribute to the positive relationship between firms’ tail risk, highlighting the multifaceted roles of institutional investors in the contagion of firms’ tail risk. Finally, the CIB peer effect on tail risk is stronger when the CEO is more risk averse, CIBs hold more shares, or CIBs are pressure-sensitive (i.e., banks and insurance companies).