The purpose of this paper is to investigate if a country’s quality of governance moderates the effect of natural disasters on start-up activity within that country. We test our hypotheses using a panel of 95 countries from 2006 to 2016. Our findings suggest that natural disasters discourage...

Pursuing delinquent borrowers requires considerable effort, and creditors may lack the incentive to exert this costly effort in uncompetitive banking sectors. To examine this, we use a uniquely large dataset of public and private corporate bankruptcy filings spanning a banking-sector reform that...

Using data on corruption convictions from the U.S. Department of Justice, we find that auditors charge higher fees when a firm is headquartered in a more corrupt district. This result is robust to a wide range of time and location fixed effects, using capital city isolation as an instrument, and...

I find that managers manage earnings upward in the quarters preceding a debt-covenant violation, but downward in the quarter a violation occurs. And they continue to manage earnings downward while the firm remains in violation. Because this scenario can play out within a year, the use of yearly...

Stock repurchases are controversial. Researchers often view the positive association between free cash flow and the volume of the stock repurchases to be in the shareholders’ interest and the positive association between executive options and stock repurchases to be in the managers’...