The "leverage effect" refers to the well-established relationship between stock returns and both implied and realized volatility: volatility increases when the stock price falls. A standard explanation ties the phenomenon to the effect a change in market valuation of a firm's equity has on the...

This paper develops a self-enforcing contract model to show that better economic fundamentals can help when there is weak rule of law-but with order-to attract foreign direct investment, whereas lowering taxes does not necessarily help. Using a cross-region Chinese dataset, the analysis finds...

In this paper, we show that although ex ante equityholders would like to adopt an optimal displacement and operating policy, they may not have incentives to implement such a policy ex post when the manager acquires firmspecific human capital and becomes indispensable to the firm¡¯s continued...