We examine how firms respond to requests for enhanced disclosure that we make on an online investor platform. Exploiting variation in firms’ customer and supplier disclosures, we ask a randomized set of non-disclosing firms to provide information on their customers’ and suppliers’...

When emerging market firms disclose relationship-based transactions, they face a tradeoff in which greater transparency may help lower their cost of capital at the cost of revealing proprietary information. We find that firms overcome this challenge by relying on analysts within their private...

Social ties between mutual funds and the companies in which they invest (investees) can both facilitate information transfers and encourage favoritism. Using the investment choices of mutual funds in China, we compare investment performance of holdings in companies that are socially connected to...

Using textual analyses of 1.8 million articles, this paper examines whether the authoritarian government in China, despite its direct ownership and control of the press, manages to increase the diversity of corporate news through commercialization and conglomeration reforms. Through the creation...

We study how the availability of domestic credit influences the contribution that financing activities make to a firm's return on equity (ROE). Using a sample of 51,866 firms from 69 countries, we find that financing activities contribute more to a firm's ROE in countries with higher domestic...