This study investigates whether institutional bond blockholders (i.e., bond funds that hold more than 5% of a firm’s outstanding bonds) impede firm innovative activities, and if they do, through which channels. We find that long-term bond blockholders do not discourage firms from conducting...

An underlying assumption in the executive compensation literature is that there is a national labor market for CEOs. The urban economics literature, however, documents higher ability among workers in large metropolitans, which results in a real and stable urban wage premium. In this paper, we...

Using the recent financial crisis as a natural quasi-experiment, we test whether and to what extent conservative accounting affects shareholder value. We find that there is significantly positive and economically meaningful relation between conservatism and firm stock performance during the...

This paper investigates the effect of CFO gender on corporate financial reporting decision-making. Focusing on firms that experience changes of CFO from male to female, the paper compares the firms’ degree of accounting conservatism between pre- and post-transition periods. We find that female...

This paper examines what institutional and bank-specific factors determine bank stock price synchronicity. Using data on 37 countries from 1996–2007, we find that bank stocks are more aligned with the whole market (1) during the financial crisis; (2) in countries that have more credit provided...

This paper examines through various channels the effects of CEO social network heterogeneity on firm value. We construct four measures of heterogeneity based on demographic attributes, intellectual backgrounds, professional experience, and geographical exposures of individuals in the CEO social...

This study uses the current financial crisis as a quasi-experiment to examine whether and to what extent corporate boards affect the performance of firms. Using cumulative stock returns over the crisis to measure of firm performance, we find that board independence, as traditionally defined,...

We investigate the role of corporate boards in bank loan contracting. We find that when corporate boards are more independent, both price and nonprice loan terms (e.g., interest rates, collateral, covenants, and performance-pricing provisions) are more favorable, and syndicated loans comprise...

We investigate how borrowers’ corporate governance influences bank loan contracting terms in emerging markets and how this relation varies across countries with different country-level governance. We find that borrowers with stronger corporate governance obtain favorable contracting terms with...

Motivated by recent studies that show female CFOs are more risk averse than male CFOs when making various corporate decisions, we examine whether banks take into consideration the gender of CFOs when pricing bank loans. We find that in our sample, firms under the control of female CFOs on...