We investigate whether and how CEO marital status is related to dividend policy. We find that firms run by single CEOs are less likely to pay dividends. Further analyses reveal that the aforementioned relation is stronger for single CEOs who are more risk-seeking, have compensation packages with lower pay-performance sensitivity, are less conservative, or are less engaged in corporate social responsibility activities. Our results hold in multiple robustness and endogeneity tests, including propensity score matching, difference-in-differences estimation, and an instrumental variable regression. Overall, our findings contribute to the literature highlighting the importance of CEOs' personal attributes for corporate decisions.

We study the impact of shareholder-initiated litigation risk on a firm's stock price crash risk. Our empirical analysis takes advantage of the staggered adoption of universal demand laws, which led to an exogenous decline in derivative litigation risk. We find that a decline in the threat of derivative litigation reduces crash risk and that information hoarding associated with earnings management is a channel through which litigation risk affects crash risk. The relationship is also moderated by how exposed firms are to the other primary form of shareholder litigation, namely securities class-action lawsuits.

This study investigates whether the management earnings forecasts of Republican and Democratic CEOs differ due to systematic differences in their information disclosure preferences. We find that Republican CEOs prefer a less asymmetric information environment than Democrat CEOs, and thus make more frequent, timelier, and more accurate disclosures than Democrat CEOs. Results using the propensity score matched sample and difference-in-differences analysis show that our results are unlikely to be driven by potential endogeneity. Our results are robust to controlling for various CEO characteristics and are stronger for firms with higher levels of institutional ownership and litigation risk.