This paper examines how a firm’s employment policy, particularly employee cash profit-sharing plans, affects its financial reporting. We find that firms with employee cash profit-sharing programs are more likely to engage in downward earnings management to reduce labor costs, especially with...

Online lending provides a means of fast financing for borrowers based on their creditworthiness. However, borrowers may undermine this agreement due to early repayment or default, which are two major concerns for the platform and lenders, since both affect the profitability of a loan. While...

We propose that general purpose technologies (GPTs) — a class of technologies that have pervasive impacts on the economy and spill over across countries — are a source of non-diversifiable technology risk in international stock markets. We construct an empirical GPT factor from patent data...

Returns to agricultural research are of significant interest to funding bodies and research administrators. Ex-ante economic analyses have increasingly formed part of decision-making process of allocating funds to agricultural research proposals. ex-ante analyses are required to present economic...

Purpose – The New Zealand (NZ) dairy industry faces the challenge of increasing productivity and dealing with public concerns over nutrient pollution. The effective policy needs to address regional differences in productivity and fertilizer use. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how...

The consumption growth data strongly favor a two-regime specification. The high volatility, low growth regime is associated with deep recessions: the Great Depression, the recession of 1937-1938, the post-war recession of 1945, and the most recent financial crisis. I develop parsimonious models...

Using the US-China trade war as a quasi-natural experiment, we investigate how downstream firm shrinkage affects upstream firm employment from the perspective of supply chain transmission effects with a difference-in-differences (DID) design. We reveal a significant negative impact of downstream...

Defining colloquial skepticism as an attitude of analysts’ doubt on firm’s fundamentals conveyed in conference calls, we examine whether colloquial skepticism can be used to predict stock prices. We propose a deep-learning method to quantify colloquial skepticism using more than 27,000...