The regulations that shape the design and the operations of corporations, credit and securities markets differ vastly from country to country. In addition, similar regulations are often unequally enforced in different countries. Economists still have an imperfect understanding of why these international differences exist and of whether they tend to persist over time. However, a recent strand of...

This study proposes an information asymmetry hypothesis to examine why bank credit ratings vary among countries even when bank financial ratios remain constant. Countries are divided among those with low and high information asymmetry. The former include high-income countries, those in North America and West Europe regions, and those with strong institutional environment quality, whereas the la...

Using a sample of 43 countries, we examine the association between societal trust and firms‟ voluntary and regulated financial reporting and disclosure quality. We explore two competing predictions. On one hand, societal trust and voluntary reporting quality are predicted to have a negative association if greater trust lowers stakeholders‟ demand for information. Similarly, a predicted negative...

We examine exogenous changes in state corporate income taxes over the 1988-2006 period and find that tax decreases significantly boost both the quantity, measured by the number of patents, and the quality, measured by citations per patent, of innovative output, while tax increases have little impact on innovation. Most of the impact of tax changes on innovation occurs two or more years after th...

Organizational boards of directors are one of the most important subgroups within most modern organizations, performing critical advisory, monitoring and resource dependence roles. This paper investigates the crucial question of whether the stock market values ethnic and gender diversity within organizational boards. We find that board diversity is positively associated with market valuation. W...

U.S. corporate leverage has decreased markedly since 1992. We find greater institutional ownership explains this deleveraging trend. Without institutions’ influence, total leverage would be eight percentage points higher today. Detection of this relationship was elusive since researchers often combine all years and institutions. Yet legal barriers to institutional activism persisted until 1992....

SUMMARY The value of PCAOB enforcement was questioned in a 2019 Project on Government Oversight report, calling it “toothless body law.” However, the argument focused narrowly limited number enforcements imposed Big 4 auditors without consideration whether they motivate positive audit quality effects more broadly. In this paper, we summarize key findings by Lamoreaux, Mowchan, and Zhang (2023) ...

Recently, fiber has been incorporated into concrete mixtures, where its distribution in the matrix helps to improve and enhance mechanical properties of fiber-reinforced (FRC). The aim this study is investigate influence steel synthetic parameters, along with different coarse aggregate maximum sizes (CAMZs) on FRC performance. Additionally, past research, empirical relationships among compressi...

A dividend imputation tax system provides shareholders with a tax credit that can be used to offset personal tax on dividend income. The size of this credit depends on tax paid at the corporate level so that the “double taxation” of dividends is effectively eliminated. This paper shows how to infer the value of imputation tax credits (which is an important input into the weighted-average cost o...

Exploiting a large new database, this article explores the incorporation choices of closely held U.S. corporations. The majority of corporations in our sample incorporate in the state in which their primary place of business (PPB) is located. However, among the corporations with 1000 or more employees, only about half incorporate in their PPB state, and of those that do not, more than half are ...