This study explores the influence of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) enforcement on corporate green innovation, as measured by green patent counts and citations. Our findings show that EPA-enforced firms experience a substantial uptick in green innovation outputs. This boost can be attributed to enhanced green innovation efficiency and increased hiring of green inventors. Moreover, this effect is more pronounced for firms headquartered in states with stronger environmental enforcement intensity, firms with higher institutional ownership, and firms with fewer financial constraints. Finally, we find that green innovations help enforced firms avoid future EPA enforcements and reduce toxic chemical releases. Taken together, these results imply that EPA enforcement actions can indeed foster positive impacts on corporate green innovation.

This paper studies the effect of board reforms on stock liquidity using data from 37 countries. We document that board reforms significantly increase stock liquidity: the effective spread on average decreases by 12.7% after a board reform. As information asymmetry is a key determinant of stock liquidity, we further find that board reforms decrease information asymmetry, and the treatment effect of board reforms on stock liquidity is stronger for firms with ex ante higher information asymmetry. Finally, board reforms facilitate healthy stock market development, with the effect being stronger for countries with lower aggregate stock market liquidity prior to reforms.

Given the complex and controversial nature of short-selling regulation, we review the academic literature and provide insights for policy makers and academics. We organize the complex history of short-selling regulation into three areas: trading restrictions, securities lending regulations, and disclosure requirements. We identify, analyze, and discuss 45 distinct regulations promulgated from 1896 to 2021, primarily by reviewing the academic literature and the data sources employed. We provide several insights regarding the effectiveness of regulatory approaches and the wider impact of short-selling regulation on markets

Financial regulators considering the desirability of a new rule or regulation sometimes use pilot studies for evidence-based decision making. Although pilot studies can generate new knowledge, they also can be expensive and subject to serious selection biases, spillover problems, and the infeasibility of a blind design. Alternatively, regulators can often evaluate a proposed regulation’s impact by analyzing archival data or applying theory based on well-accepted economic principles. We discuss why pilot studies can be useful, but also why regulators and industry participants sometimes favor pilot studies with little scientific value. We illustrate these issues by discussing various SEC pilot studies

We study the agency implications of increased disclosure using a regulatory change in the mutual fund industry as an experimental setting. This quasi-natural experiment mandated more frequent portfolio disclosure, which we show imposes managerial skill-reassessment risks from investors on funds with high relative performance volatility. In turn, this risk translates into greater agency costs to investors. We show that high-volatility funds, relative to low-volatility funds, responded to the increased skill-reassessment risk after regulation with an increase in management fees and a decrease in risk taking. These actions get transmitted to fund investors in the form of inferior net performance

We develop an agency model in which managerial information manipulation creates pooling and entails ex post costs internal and/or external to the firm. We examine the implications of the strategic interactions between shareholders (who set internal governance and managerial incentive compensation), the manager (who exerts effort and reports on its outcome), and an external regulatory authority or RA (who investigates for fraud and levies penalties ex post). When the RA cannot pre-commit to an ex post investigation strategy, a fraudulent equilibrium obtains if the firm's internal governance costs are sufficiently high. Consistent with (so far fairly scant) post-SOX empirical evidence, but the opposite of the implications of signal-jamming models and equilibria with pre-commitment, the model implies an increase in minimum internal governance standards or ex post fraud penalties (as with SOX) results in decreased equilibrium pay-for-performance sensitivity and firm performance.

We examine the effects of regulations designed to address the potential conflict of interest that arises when sell-side analyst research is not independent of investment banking. We focus on two types of regulation: (1) internal barriers between equity research and investment banking that restrict communication; and (2) disclosure requirements relating to analyst compensation. We find that information barriers can increase research effort and improve report quality by limiting an investment bank's ability to distort its analyst's incentives. However, this type of regulation can also reduce information production and lower the quality of reports if an investment bank benefits directly from research activity. Disclosure requirements, on the other hand, unambiguously lead to more informative prices and a higher report quality relative to either information barriers or no regulation

We analyze the limits of regulating bank CEO compensation to reduce risk shifting in the presence of an active board that retains the right to approve new investment strategies. Compensation regulation prevents overinvestment in strategies that increase risk, but it is ineffective in preventing underinvestment in strategies that reduce risk. The regulator optimally combines compensation and capital regulations. In contrast, if the board delegates the choice of strategy to the CEO, compensation regulation is sufficient to prevent both types of risk shifting. Compensation regulation increases shareholders’ incentives to implement an active board, which reduces the effectiveness of compensation regulation

Using a sample of 2198 completed M&A transactions between 1994 and 2010 in which both target and acquirer are public US firms supplemented with hand-collected data for target CEO retention, we uncover a significantly negative relation between target CEO retention and takeover premiums received by target shareholders. Further, when the target CEO was not retained, we document a significantly negative relation between the relative importance of the severance pay received by the target CEO and takeover premium. Taken together, our findings, which hold in various robustness tests, suggest that target CEOs bargain shareholder value for personal benefits during corporate takeovers. Our findings have important policy implications for takeover disclosures.