I find that aggregate asset growth constructed from bottom-up data negatively predicts future market returns both in and out-of-sample and this result is robust across G7 countries. I further show that aggregate asset growth contains information about future market returns not captured by traditional macroeconomic variables and other measures of investment or growth. The forecasting ability of asset growth is strongly correlated with its propensity to predict more optimistic analyst forecasts and subsequent downward revisions, earnings surprise, and systematic errors in investors’ expectations. The time-varying risk premium also appears key in explaining the documented return predictability.

We find that firms experiencing improvements in crowdsourced employer ratings significantly outperform firms with declines. The return effect is concentrated among reviews from current employees, stronger among early firm reviews, and also stronger when the employee works in the headquarters state. Decomposing employer ratings, we find the return effect is related to changing employee assessments of Career Opportunities and views of senior management. It is unrelated to work-life balance. Employer rating changes are associated with growth in sales and profitability and help forecast one-quarter-ahead earnings announcement surprises. The evidence is consistent with employee reviews revealing fundamental information about the firm.

We empirically examine whether adopting a uniform set of accounting standards mitigates information frictions in financial markets and facilitates market integration. Using a difference‐in‐difference design, we find that after the mandatory adoption of IFRS local stock returns incorporate more global information and at a faster speed. The effect of IFRS adoption is stronger in countries where there are larger improvements in accounting comparability and for firms with a larger increase in foreign ownership. Overall, our results suggest that accounting standards harmonization facilitates financial market integration.

In this study, we show that when a firm needs external financing, information quality has real effects via financing contracts on the firm's input to influence its operational outcome. Interestingly, we find that higher information quality decreases overall efficiency. Our analysis highlights the importance of considering the role of information quality in the presence of the firm's input decision upon financing contracts. In particular, information quality has a feedforward effect on the firm's real input decision via financing contracts, which in turn has a feedback effect on financing contracts and overall efficiency.

This paper examines corporate tax evasion from both a financial and governance perspective: one, the impact of tax evasion on a multinational (MNC)'s financial performance and secondly, whether corporate governance levels affect the probability of the multinational committing tax evasion. We specifically address: (i) whether MNCs suffer any adverse short and long-term effects on their financial performance following news that the firm in question has committed, or is suspected of committing, tax evasion and (ii) whether firm and country level governance has any influence on the likelihood of MNCs evading tax. In the short-term, we find that share prices drop in the event window around the announcement date. Further, we find evidence that multinationals do not suffer long-term reputational damage from tax evasion (unless there is repeated media follow-up); leaving no impact on firm profitability or value. We also find that a small number of firm level governance, tax-efficiency based governance and country governance measures have a significant relationship with an MNC's likelihood to commit tax evasion.