This paper examines the role of peer firm disclosures in shaping corporate research and development (R&D) investments. Drawing on models of two‐stage R&D races, I hypothesize that a firm could be either deterred or encouraged by peer disclosure of interim R&D success, depending on peer firms’ R&D strength in the race. Using granular, project‐level data on clinical trials in the drug development process, I find that a firm's R&D investments in a specific therapeutic area are deterred by disclosures of early‐phase trial initiation from strong rivals in the same area but encouraged by disclosures from weak rivals. Cross‐sectional analyses show that focal firm strength and disclosure relevance moderate the effects of peer firm disclosure. Overall, my evidence suggests that peer firms’ R&D disclosures can have both proprietary costs and deterrence benefits.

We study the market impact of a very successful financial innovation – the SPDR Gold Trust exchange-traded fund (GLD). GLD holds physical gold, and provides traders with a convenient and cost-effective way to gain exposure to gold. We find that after the introduction of GLD, the liquidity of gold company stocks declined, and their adverse-selection risk increased. Over the two-month period after GLD’s introduction, the stocks’ relative effective bid-ask spreads increased by over 15%, while their adverse-selection cost, as measured by the price impact of trades, went up by more than 30%. Gold stocks also experienced significant negative abnormal returns (−12% on average) in the month after GLD started trading. Our findings suggest that GLD attracted traders, especially uninformed traders, away from gold company stocks, and that the resulting negative demand shocks and decrease in the stocks’ liquidity caused their prices to decline. Our results show that existing securities can be seriously adversely affected when a new security enters the market.

This study examines how two factors, the agents’ perceptions regarding the fairness of the principal and inter-agent communication, affect agents’ behaviors under a peer reporting system. Analytical models show that when agents can observe each other’s actions and local signals, a peer reporting system with a verification mechanism (using one agent’s information to verify the other’s) and a reward for truthful whistleblowing can induce agents to report honestly and thereby help the principal achieve the first-best outcome. However, behavioral research suggests that the agents’ perception regarding the fairness of the principal, as well as communication among agents, may affect how honestly agents report. The results of my experiment show that, under a peer reporting system with a high reward for whistleblowing, the agents’ perception regarding the fairness of the principal positively affects the agents’ reporting honesty and negatively affects their explicit attempts at collusion. Communication between agents decreases their reporting honesty when the principal is perceived as unfair, but not when the principal is perceived as fair.

Unionized workers are entitled to special treatment in bankruptcy court that can be detrimental to other corporate stakeholders, with unsecured creditors standing to lose the most. Using data on union elections, we employ a regression discontinuity design to identify the effect of worker unionization on bondholders in bankruptcy states. Closely won union elections lead to significant bond value losses, especially when firms approach bankruptcy, have underfunded pension plans, and operate in non-RTW law states. Unionization is associated with longer, more convoluted, and costlier bankruptcy court proceedings. Unions depress bondholders’ recovery values as they are assigned seats on creditors’ committees.

It is recognized in the literature that there is a negative relationship between fund performance and fund exit. This paper analyses the performance of 6600 U.S. mutual funds that exited the market in the 2000–2014 period and nearly twice as many U.S. mutual funds that remained operational, to provide evidence on whether the negative exit – performance relationship existed during the 2008 financial crisis. We confirm the general relationship but show that, in contrast to all the other periods, there was no statistically significant exit – performance relationship during the financial crisis. We also show that the impact of expenses and loads on fund exit increased during the crisis. This is consistent with our argument that when some active investors leave the market, the passive ones become important to fund–families, albeit the investors may lose out as a result. We also show that the mergers that occurred in the years following the financial crisis resulted in statistically significantly worse post–merger performance of both the acquirers and of the targets in comparison with their pre–merger performance.

This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Review of Accounting Studies. The final authenticated version is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11142-014-9295-6

This study investigates experimentally how mutual monitoring affects effort when employees are compensated via rank‐order tournaments. Theory and anecdotal evidence suggest that mutual monitoring may either decrease effort by facilitating collusion or increase effort by stimulating competition. In our first experiment, we find that mutual monitoring increases effort, because participants do not attempt to collude but rather behave competitively. This result leads us to expand our theory and develop hypotheses to predict that the effect of mutual monitoring depends on whether employees have the inclination to collude or compete. Specifically, we predict that mutual monitoring decreases effort when employees are inclined to collude and increases effort when employees are inclined to compete; that is, mutual monitoring will not change the basic inclination created by the workplace setting, but will “turn up the volume” on the effect that such inclination has on effort. Consistent with our predictions, our second experiment finds that mutual monitoring leads to lower effort when participants have a collusive inclination and (eventually) higher effort when they have a competitive inclination. Overall, the results from these two experiments suggest that allowing employees to observe each other's productive effort in tournament incentive settings may have positive or negative consequences for the firm, depending on whether environmental factors predispose employees to collude or compete.

The distribution of power in the political system shapes the financial reporting opacity of banks. Specifically, banks located in states with senators on the Senate Banking Committee (BC senators) have greater abnormal loan loss provisions than banks in other states. The result is stronger for larger banks and banks with higher risk. In addition, BC senators have a negative effect on the likelihood of banks in their home states receiving enforcement actions, and, more importantly, this effect is stronger for more opaque banks. These findings suggest that politicians, regulators, and banks use opaque financial reporting to facilitate regulatory forbearance. Moreover, we show that opacity is a significant channel through which BC senators increase bank risk. During economic downturns, however, BC senators appear to promote bank opacity to encourage bank lending and create liquidity. Finally, the capital market does not penalize the reporting opacity of banks in states with BC senators.