type="main" <p>The authors' study provides suggestive evidence of the negative effects of politically connected CEOs on the corporate performance and governance of publicly listed companies in China. Newly listed Chinese companies with politically connected CEOs are more likely to have boards that...</p>

Pyramidal organizational structures are common throughout the world. This article considers an explanation for pyramids built by the state: separating firms from political interference. Although intermediate pyramidal layers insulate managers from a pyramid's top owners and hence induce agency...

We find that analysts' forecast errors are predicted by past accounting accruals (adjustments to cash flows to obtain reported earnings) among both equity issuers and nonissuers. Analysts are more optimistic for the subsequent four years for issuers reporting higher issue-year accruals. The...

In emerging markets, the agency conflicts between controlling owners and the minority shareholders are difficult to mitigate through conventional corporate control mechanisms such as boards of directors and takeovers. We examine whether external independent auditors are employed as monitors or...

We provide among the first empirical evidence, consistent with recent macro global game crisis models, that shows that the precision of public signals can coordinate crises. In these models, self-fulfilling crises independent of fundamentals can occur only when publicly disclosed signals of...

Do differences in countries' accounting standards affect global investment decisions? We explore this question by examining how accounting distance, the difference in the accounting standards used in the investor's and the investee's countries, affects the asset allocation decisions of global...

The returns of hedge fund investors depend not only on the returns of the funds they hold but also on the timing and magnitude of their capital flows in and out of these funds. We use dollar-weighted returns (a form of Internal Rate of Return (IRR)) to assess the properties of actual investor...