In a cross-country setting, we document that stronger religiosity is associated with lower loan interest spread. In addition, we show that this negative association is more pronounced in countries with weaker creditor rights, suggesting that religious values play a more significant role in...

We examine the relation between customer concentration, a critically important aspect of a firm's business model, and the level of corporate tax avoidance. A firm with a concentrated corporate customer base needs to hold more cash, faces a higher likelihood of financial distress, has a stronger...

Masulis and Mobbs (2014, 2015) find that independent directors with multiple directorships allocate their monitoring effort unequally based on a directorship's relative prestige. We investigate whether bank loan contract terms reflect such unequal allocation of directors' monitoring effort. We...

This study examines whether corporate social responsibility (CSR) is related to the likelihood of corporate inversions, a legal tax planning strategy. We use a full sample to test stakeholder theory and a risk-management view of CSR. We find that firms with higher CSR performance are less likely...

Accounting researchers question the effect of (“bright-line”) regulations on firms' financial reporting behavior. To offer evidence on this issue, we take advantage of the regulatory environment in the Chinese setting. In China, regulators have created a bright line at which firms must...

Lending corruption is an important agency problem for banks. Using data from the World Bank Business Environmental Survey, we find that in countries with more lending corruption, banks give more favorable loan terms to borrowers. This relation is stronger when firms are under more financing...

Using an international sample of banks and country-level measures for several dimensions of religion, we study how differences in religiosity across countries affect earnings management. Given that religiosity is a major source of morality and ethical behavior, it may reduce excessive risk...

We investigate the association between material weakness in internal controls (MW) disclosed under Section 302 of SOX and future stock price crash risk. We argue that relative to firms with effective internal controls, firms with MW have lower financial reporting precision. The lower reporting...

Public firms are becoming increasingly interconnected through institutional investors' stock ownership, specifically through cross-ownership, in which an institutional investor has a significant stake in multiple firms in the same industry. When a firm seeks external financing for its investment...