This study examines the impact of managerial foreign experience on corporate innovation using manually collected data of Chinese listed companies. We find that managerial foreign experience is positively associated with corporate innovation. This association is robust to a series of robustness checks, including the use of Heckman two-step sample selection model, propensity score matching procedure, and the market reaction to the appointing announcements of managers with foreign experience. Further analyses indicate that senior managers with foreign experience have a more significant impact on corporate innovation than junior managers with foreign experience; both foreign study experience and foreign work experience have important impacts on corporate innovation; managers with foreign experience in private enterprises have more initiatives to innovate than in state-owned enterprises; and managers who gain foreign experience in the United States tend to be more influential and innovative than those who have foreign experience from other countries or regions. Overall, our results suggest that managerial foreign experience matters for corporate innovation in emerging markets.

This study investigates whether and how institutional investors' site visits affect corporate innovation. Using all Chinese firms listed in the Shenzhen Stock Exchange from 2009 to 2013, we find that institutional investors' site visits significantly enhance corporate innovation and this effect is more pronounced for firms with a lower-quality information environment and poor corporate governance. We further find that the governance effect of site visits on innovation is consistent with career concerns rather than the quiet life hypothesis. We perform two stage-least square analysis to address possible endogeneity concerns and several robustness checks including using alternative measures of site visits and corporate innovation, alternative model specifications, and controlling for firm fixed effects. We also find that the effects of institutions' site visits are substitutes for the effects of institutional shareholding.

By considering banks as portfolios of assets in different locations, we study how real estate shocks are transmitted across bank’s business areas, while controlling for local demand shocks and bank location-specific factors. Affected banks substantially alter their loan portfolios: we find evidence of real estate price declines affecting both real estate and non-real-estate types of lending. Banks also roll over and fail to liquidate problematic loans, while accumulating more nonperforming loans. These results provide evidence of internal contagion in real estate shocks within banks.

The beta anomaly, negative (positive) alpha on stocks with high (low) beta, arises from beta’s positive correlation with idiosyncratic volatility (IVOL). The relation between IVOL and alpha is positive among underpriced stocks but negative and stronger among overpriced stocks (Stambaugh, Yu, and Yuan, 2015). That stronger negative relation combines with the positive IVOL-beta correlation to produce the beta anomaly. The anomaly is significant only within overpriced stocks and only in periods when the beta-IVOL correlation and the likelihood of overpricing are simultaneously high. Either controlling for IVOL or simply excluding overpriced stocks with high IVOL renders the beta anomaly insignificant.

We examine whether the information content of the earnings report, as captured by the earnings response coefficient (ERC), increases when investors’ uncertainty about the manager's reporting objectives decreases, as predicted in Fischer and Verrecchia (2000). We use the 2006 mandatory compensation disclosures as an instrument to capture a decrease in investors’ uncertainty about managers’ incentives and reporting objectives. Employing a difference-in-differences design and exploiting the staggered adoption of the new rules, we find a statistically and economically significant increase in ERC for treated firms relative to control firms, largely driven by profit firms. Cross-sectional tests suggest that the effect is more pronounced in subsets of firms most affected by the new rules. Our findings represent the first empirical evidence of a role of compensation disclosures in enhancing the information content of financial reports.

Non-compete covenants are widely used in employment contracts to promote employee stability. Using legal amendments of non-compete enforceability as a natural experiment, we find that as non-compete enforceability increases, firms display an increased likelihood of meeting short-term earnings benchmarks, lower discretionary expenditures, and declining future performance. These effects are more pronounced when CEOs have lower ability or shorter tenures, and when firms have more growth opportunities or operate in localized industries. Our results suggest that managers actively adapt investment and financial reporting practices to the changing environment that affects their contractual relations with firms.

The Hou et al. (2015) q-factor model outperforms other factor models in capturing the price-to-high (PTH, the ratio of current price to 52-week high price) anomaly; that is, high-PTH stocks earn high future returns. PTH's relations with future profitability and future investment growth are both significantly positive, and they mirror PTH's relation with future returns in the cross section and by time horizons. Incorporating the information about future investment growth contained in price level variables (e.g., PTH) helps the q factors to capture better those anomalies rooted in future investment growth. Together, these results suggest that the PTH anomaly is consistent with the investment capital asset pricing model.

We provide new empirical evidence for the way in which financial markets process information. Our results rely critically on high-frequency intraday price and volume data for the S&P 500 equity portfolio and U.S. Treasury bonds, along with new econometric techniques, for making inference on the relationship between trading intensity and spot volatility around public news announcements. Consistent with the predictions derived from a theoretical model in which investors agree to disagree, our estimates for the intraday volume-volatility elasticity around important news announcements are systematically below unity. Our elasticity estimates also decrease significantly with measures of disagreements in beliefs, economic uncertainty, and textual-based sentiment, further highlighting the key role played by differences-of-opinion.

This study examines whether crackdown on political corruption in China affects future stock price crashes. Using data from corruption-related prosecutions, we find that firms under prosecuted official jurisdictions experience a significant decrease in crash risk after the crackdown. Cross-sectional tests show that results are more pronounced for firms with higher political dependence on governments and for firms with worse information environment. Moreover, channel tests provide direct evidence that crackdown decreases crash risk by reducing political risk and bad news hoarding. Overall, our study offers novel evidence on how crackdown on corruption benefits firms.

We explore whether firms’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities provide added value to capital market participants through seasoned equity offerings (SEOs). SEOs represent cleaner exogenous activity alleviating the reverse causality issue plaguing many prior studies examining the relation between firm performance and CSR. Using a large sample of U.S. SEOs, we find high-CSR issuers experience fewer negative market reactions to SEO announcements. We also show ethical issuers have incentive to provide extensive and informative disclosures, which mitigate the degree of information asymmetry, thereby decreasing SEO underpricing. Among CSR categories, we find issuers engaging in community and environmental CSR activities and improving the rights of women and minorities are more effective at reducing SEO negative announcement returns and underpricing. Our findings remain robust after controlling for possible self-selection bias and endogeneity problems. Overall, our findings support the stakeholder value maximization view of stakeholder theory and ethical theory.