The U.S. is one of the world’s most litigious countries. According to a 2010 New York Times article, “we spend about 2.2% of gross domestic product, roughly $310 billion a year, or about $1,000 for each person in the country on tort litigation, much higher than any other country.” The defendant of a tort claim… Read More »
Do companies adapt their financial disclosures in accordance with the ease by which their stakeholders can access this information? To facilitate submission and dissemination of corporate filings, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Release No. 33-6977 from February 1993 mandated all SEC-registered firms to electronically submit all regulatory filings to the Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis,… Read More »
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) operates an enormously successful whistleblower award program. In just ten years, it has paid out over $1.3 billion to individuals who have helped the SEC prosecute hundreds of securities violations. Most award recipients are regular employees who report their employer, but a small portion are compliance personnel. Compliance… Read More »
In a new study, we examine whether climate-related uncertainty leads to increased managerial short-termism. “Climate-related uncertainty” refers to managers’ inability to predict the scale and costs of climate change on their firm’s operating environment. Managers, policy makers, and institutional investors have all expressed increased concern about climate-related uncertainty, especially uncertainty stemming from exposure to natural… Read More »
Firms make investments to increase their future profits because they help reduce production costs, increase capacity, or upgrade their products or services. However, firms do not always make investments to improve production efficiency or customer demand. They often make investments to strategically influence competitors’ behavior. Due to their costly-to-reverse and time-bound nature, investments signal credible… Read More »
Does the increasing attention to cryptocurrencies divert investor attention away from the traditional equity market? In our recent paper, we study whether attention to cryptocurrency impacts information processing and price efficiency in the equity market. The cryptocurrency market has grown from $17 billion at the beginning of 2017 to $2.2 trillion at the end of… Read More »
Understanding how audit market competition affects audit quality is of significant interest to academics, practitioners, and regulators, with important capital market and policy implications. Regulators around the world have expressed concerns that companies have too few choices in the audit market and believe that the lack of choice is resulting in low competition. As a… Read More »
Are bidders in mergers and acquisitions (M&A) able to exploit their overvaluation by using overpriced shares as acquisition currency? The question has been debated within the financial economics literature since Shleifer and Vishny (2003) and Rhodes-Kropf and Viswanathan (2004) put forth theories suggesting that misvaluation drives the payment method in M&A deals. These seminal papers… Read More »
Since early May 2022, a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) known as “bZx DAO” has been facing a lawsuit in California. The plaintiffs hold the defendants liable for their losses following a hack of the protocol that was managed by the DAO. This case is reminiscent of the first DAO known as “The DAO”, which was… Read More »
There is a heated academic debate about the degree to which market prices of financial assets reflect underlying fundamental values, well summarized by this paper. There are two main schools of thought on the topic: behavioural finance and efficient-market theory. According to the first school of thought, market prices are the result of the interactions… Read More »
