This paper explores rent-seeking behavior in a heavily regulated equity-financing market. Using manually-collected information about ownership changes from China's IPO application filings for the Growth Enterprise Market (GEM), we find that over a third of firms receive late-stage private equity...

This paper examines the real effects of outlier opinions in the context of extreme analyst optimism. We find that managers appear to respond to the extremism in outlier forecasts with more aggressive earnings management, instead of ignoring them as noise. The effect of extreme optimism is more...

We perform transaction-level analyses of entrusted loans—one of the largest components of shadow banking in China. Entrusted loans involve firms with privileged access to cheap capital channeling funds to less privileged firms, and increase when credit is tight. Nonaffiliated loans have much...

A medium - for example, points or money - is a token people receive as the immediate reward of their effort.It has no value in and of itself, but it can be traded for a desired outcome. Experiments demonstrate that, when people are faced with options entailing different outcomes, the presence of...

How does previous military experience affect corporate managers’ behavior in earnings management? Using a sample of listed Chinese firms, we find that managers with military experience are associated with higher levels of earnings management, through both accrual-based and real-activities...

Motivated by Hoff and Stiglitz (2004)'s theory, we examine empirically how the creation of "rules of the game" affect the behavior of economic agents in a transition economy. Using a sample of Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in which controlling ownership was transferred to private...

We find that several factors explain an individual investor's style, i.e., the value versus growth orientation of the investor's stock portfolio. First, we find that an investor's style has a biological basis and is partially ingrained in an investor from birth. Second, we show that an...

To inform economists and policy makers about whether the effects of nudges are persistent in one specific context, we study the choice architecture of the Swedish Premium Pension Plan. The data we study consist of all initial choices and subsequent rebalancing activities by the entire population...

Corporate executives managing some of the largest public companies in the U.S. are shaped by their daughters. When a firm's CEO has a daughter, the corporate social responsibility rating is about 9.1% higher, compared to a median firm. The results are robust to confronting several sources of...

Informal risk sharing within social networks and formal financial contracts both enable households to manage risk. We find that financial contracting reduces participation in social networks. Specifically, increased crop insurance usage decreased local religious adherence and congregation...