We study the effects of local religious beliefs on mutual fund risk-taking behaviors. Funds located in <i>low</i>-Protestant or <i>high</i>-Catholic areas exhibit significantly higher fund return volatilities. Similar differences persist when we use the religiosity ratios at fund managers' college locations....

<heading id="h1" level="1" implicit="yes" format="display">ABSTRACT</heading>This study examines firm performance surrounding insiders' prepaid variable forward (PVF) transactions to infer insiders' information when they enter these off-market contracts. PVFs allow insiders to hedge downside risk, share performance gains, and obtain immediate large-sum cash...

We argue that a firm's suppliers and customers prefer it to account more conservatively due to information asymmetry and these stakeholders' asymmetric payoffs with respect to the firm's performance. We predict that a firm meets this demand for accounting conservatism when suppliers or customers...

We examine the impact of institutional ownership on financial reporting discretion, focusing on whether the impact varies with institutions' cost of acquiring monitoring information. Using geographic distance between the firm and the institutional investor as a proxy for the cost of acquiring...