This paper examines the effect of creditor protection on the choice of government procurement contract types. We use the staggered adoption of anti-recharacterization laws (ARLs) as a quasi-natural experiment to investigate the research question. ARLs strengthen creditors’ rights to repossess collateral in bankruptcy and thus enhance creditor protection. Using a dataset of U.S. government contracts, we find a significant shift from the use of fixed-price contracts to cost-plus contracts after the adoption of ARLs. The effect is more pronounced for firms with higher default risk and stronger firm-government ties. We also find that the government is more likely to switch away or reduce the contract value for contractors affected by ARLs. Overall, our findings point to an important relation between debt contracts and government contracts.

In 2019, Chinese stock market regulators launched a comprehensive reform of the IPO regulatory system, transitioning from the approval system to the registration system. Using this reform as a quasi-natural experiment, we investigate the impact of IPO systems on market manipulation. We find that the registration system reform significantly inhibits market manipulation by improving the quality of firms’ information supply and reducing stock information asymmetry. In addition, our results indicate that the inhibitory effect of the registration system reform on market manipulation is more pronounced for firms with higher information exposure, greater information complexity, and a greater proportion of investors with better ability to interpret information. Further analyses show that the registration system reform also lowers trading values around manipulation events, and inhibits other types of trade-based manipulation and misconduct. This study sheds light on the crucial role of information transparency in financial markets’ effectiveness and investor protection.