A Fast Literature Search Engine based on top-quality journals, by Dr. Mingze Gao.

• Tian, X., & Wang, T. Y. (2014). Tolerance for Failure and Corporate Innovation. Review of Financial Studies, 27, 211–255.

  Based on a sample of venture capital (VC)-backed IPO firms, we examine whether tolerance for failure spurs corporate innovation. We develop a novel measure of VC investors' failure tolerance by examining their willingness to continue investing in underperforming ventures. We find that IPO firms backed by more failure-tolerant VC investors are significantly more innovative and VC failure tolerance is particularly important for ventures that are subject to high failure risk. We show that these results are not driven by endogenous matching between failure-tolerant VC firms and start-ups with high ex ante innovative potential. We also examine the determinants of the cross-sectional heterogeneity in a VC firm's failure tolerance. We find that both capital constraints and career concerns can negatively distort a VC firm's failure tolerance. Less experienced VC firms are more exposed to these distortions, making them less failure tolerant than are more established VC firms.

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• Van Wesep, E. D. (2014). The Idealized Electoral College Voting Mechanism and Shareholder Power. Journal of Financial Economics, 113, 90–108.

  Increasing concern over corporate governance has led to calls for more shareholder influence over corporate decisions, but allowing shareholders to vote on more issues may not affect the quality of governance. We should expect instead that, under current rules, shareholder voting will implement the preferences of the majority of large shareholders and management. This is because majority rule offers little incentive for small shareholders to vote. I offer a potential remedy in the form of a new voting rule, the Idealized Electoral College (IEC), modeled on the American Electoral College, that significantly increases the expected impact that a given shareholder has on election. The benefit of the mechanism is that it induces greater turnout, but the cost is that it sometimes assigns a winner that is not preferred by a majority of voters. Therefore, for issues on which management and small shareholders are likely to disagree, the IEC is superior to majority rule.

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• Vives, X. (2014). Strategic Complementarity, Fragility, and Regulation. Review of Financial Studies, 27, 3547–3592.

  Fragility is affected by how the balance sheet composition of financial intermediaries, the precision of information signals, and market stress parameters all influence the extent of strategic complementarity among investors' strategies. A solvency and a liquidity ratio are required to control the likelihood of insolvency and illiquidity. The solvency requirement must be strengthened in the face of increased competition, whereas the liquidity requirement must be strengthened under more conservative fund managers and higher penalties for fire sales. Greater disclosure may aggravate fragility and require an increase in the liquidity ratio, so regulators should establish prudential and disclosure policies in tandem.

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• Wang, Y., & Xia, H. (2014). Do Lenders Still Monitor When They Can Securitize Loans? Review of Financial Studies, 27, 2354–2391.

  We examine how securitization markets affect the role of banks as monitors in corporate lending. We find that banks active in securitization impose looser covenants on borrowers at origination. After origination, these borrowers take on substantially more risk than do borrowers of non-securitization-active banks. We use borrowers' geographic locations to instrument for borrower-lender matching to distinguish the effect of securitization on the banks' ex post monitoring from its effect on ex ante screening. We further investigate direct evidence of banks' monitoring role by examining their actions following covenant violations and find that securitization-active lenders are more likely to grant waivers without changing loan terms. Our results suggest that banks exert less effort on ex post monitoring when they can securitize loans.

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• Welch, I. (2014). Referee Recommendations. Review of Financial Studies, 27, 2773–2804.

  This paper quantitatively analyzes referee recommendations at eight prominent economics and finance journals, and the SFS (Society for Financial Studies) Cavalcade Conference, where a known algorithm matched referees to submissions. The behavior of referees was similar in all venues. The referee-specific component in the disposition recommendation was about twice as important as the common component. Referees differed both in their scales (some referees were intrinsically more generous than others) and in their opinions of what a good paper was (they often disagreed about the relative ordering of papers).

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• Xia, H. (2014). Can Investor Paid Credit Rating Agencies Improve the Information Quality of Issuer Paid Rating Agencies. Journal of Financial Economics, 111, 450–468.

  This paper examines how the information quality of ratings from an issuer-paid rating agency (Standard and Poor's) responds to the entry of an investor-paid rating agency, the Egan-Jones Rating Company (EJR). By comparing S&P's ratings quality before and after EJR initiates coverage of each firm, I find a significant improvement in S&P's ratings quality following EJR's coverage initiation. S&P's ratings become more responsive to credit risk and its rating changes incorporate higher information content. These results differ from the existing literature documenting a deterioration in the incumbents' ratings quality following the entry of a third issuer-paid agency. I further show that the issuer-paid agency seems to improve the ratings quality because EJR's coverage has elevated its reputational concerns.

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• Yermack, D. (2014). Tailspotting Identifying and Profiting from CEO Vacation Trips. Journal of Financial Economics, 113, 252–269.

  This paper shows connections between chief executive officers׳ (CEOs׳) absences from headquarters and corporate news disclosures. I identify CEO absences by merging records of corporate jet flights and CEOs׳ property ownership near leisure destinations. CEOs travel to their vacation homes just after companies report favorable news, and CEOs return to headquarters right before subsequent news releases. When CEOs are away, companies announce less news, mandatory disclosures occur later, and stock volatility falls sharply. Volatility increases when CEOs return to work. CEOs spend fewer days out of the office when ownership is high and when weather is bad at their vacation homes.

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• Zhu, H. (2014). Do Dark Pools Harm Price Discovery? Review of Financial Studies, 27, 747–789.

  Dark pools are equity trading systems that do not publicly display orders. Dark pools offer potential price improvements but do not guarantee execution. Informed traders tend to trade in the same direction, crowd on the heavy side of the market, and face a higher execution risk in the dark pool, relative to uninformed traders. Consequently, exchanges are more attractive to informed traders, and dark pools are more attractive to uninformed traders. Under certain conditions, adding a dark pool alongside an exchange concentrates price-relevant information into the exchange and improves price discovery. Improved price discovery coincides with reduced exchange liquidity.

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