We examine how foreign corruption regulation affects the economic benefits communities receive from extraction activities in resource-rich areas of Africa. After a mid-2000s increase in US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) enforcement, nighttime luminosity increases by 15% (5%) in communities...

We examine how foreign corruption regulation affects the economic benefits communities receive from extraction activities in resource-rich areas of Africa. After a mid-2000s increase in US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) enforcement, nighttime luminosity increases by 15% (5%) in communities...

Shareholder activism is now an important global phenomenon. We use a sample of nearly 7,000 activist shareholder campaigns across 56 countries to address two principal research questions related to the rise of activism. First, we develop a measure of corporate governance regulation that captures...

We examine the impact of foreign investors' ability to challenge allegedly harmful host-country regulations before an international arbitral tribunal under the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) provisions included in many international investment agreements. Consistent with widespread...

We identify endogenously formed same-race audit pairings based on the estimated race of audit partners and auditee executives in the nonprofit sector and show that these pairings occur at a significantly greater than random frequency. Using within auditor-year variation, we find that same-race...

This paper studies the impact of public audit oversight on financial reporting credibility. We analyze changes in market responses to earnings news after public audit oversight is introduced, exploiting that the regime onset depends on fiscal year-ends, auditors, and the rollout of auditor...

We examine the impact of foreign corruption regulation on economic development in highcorruption-risk areas. We find that, after a mid-2000s increase in enforcement of the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), economic activity (measured by nighttime luminosity) in African communities within...

We investigate the effect of cross-border regulatory cooperation in the enforcement of securities laws on global-mutual-fund portfolio allocations. Our research design exploits a shock to the Securities and Exchange Commission's oversight of foreign firms cross-listed on a US stock exchange...

Using aggregate data from national accounts, we study whether strengthening and harmonizing securities regulation across the European Union increases household equity ownership. We find a significant increase in the proportion of liquid assets invested in equity, both when a household's own...