These papers are working drafts of research which often appear in final form in academic journals. The published versions may differ from the working versions provided here.
SSRN Research Paper Series
The Social Science Research Network’s Research Paper Series includes working papers produced by Stanford GSB the Rock Center.
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Does going public affect the amount and type of corporate tax planning? Using a panel of U.S. corporate tax return data from 1994 to 2018, we show that IPO completion is associated with the implementation of multinational income…
This study finds that voluntary non-earnings disclosures substitute for redacted proprietary contract information. When firms redact contract information, they provide more voluntary disclosures and have higher information…
We examine whether the proprietary costs of economically linked peers influence focal firms’ merger and acquisition (M&A) decisions, which often involve extensive transfers of proprietary information across merging entities. Using…
An extensive literature examines whether senior executives’ contractual incentives influence their financial reporting decisions. However, little is known about whether — and how — the incentives of lower-level (or “rank-and-file”…
Equity book-to-market ratios (BTM) should not exceed one if a firm’s return on equity exceeds its cost of capital or it employs conservative accounting. Yet, BTM is above one for many firms, particularly in recession years. We…
Our study addresses whether integrated report quality, IRQ, is negatively associated with stock price synchronicity, an inverse measure of firm-specific information, and the extent to which the relation between IRQ and…
We examine the spillover effect of public firm innovation disclosures on the patent trading market. Relative to equity markets, the patent market is decentralized and rife with information frictions, yet it serves as an important…
We propose and describe a corporate carbon reporting framework intended to strengthen the credibility and transparency of the existing net-zero pledges. We refer to this framework as the Time-Consistent Corporate Carbon Reporting…
Conditionally accepted at the Journal of Accounting and Economics. We investigate the relationship between private firms’ disclosures and the demand for the equity of their publicly traded peers. Using data on the global movement…
We examine how information about the diversity of a potential employer’s workforce affects individuals’ job-seeking behavior, and whether workers’ preferences explain corporate disclosure decisions. We embed a field experiment in…
We study whether and how creditors exercise their control rights to shape their borrowers’ executive compensation plans. Highly levered borrowers often face incentives to underinvest due to agency conflicts driven by differences…
Transparency of quality in the healthcare sector primarily aims to facilitate patients’ care decisions, however, it also provides useful information to competing healthcare providers. We study how competitors respond to increased…
In this article we first summarize the specific plans articulated by seven major corporations for reducing their Corporate Carbon Footprints (abbreviated as CCF from hereon). Our sample is not intended to be representative of the…
This paper reviews the empirical methods used in the accounting literature to draw causal inferences. Similar to other social science disciplines, recent years have seen a burgeoning growth in the use of methods that seek to…
We find that financial reporting spurs consumer behavior. Using granular GPS data, we find that foot-traffic to firms’ commerce locations significantly increases in the days following their earnings announcements. Foot-traffic…
We examine whether and how firms structure their merger and acquisition (M&A) deals to avoid scrutiny from antitrust regulators. There are approximately 40% more M&As than expected bunching just below thresholds that trigger…
As governments around the world reaffirm their commitments to reduce carbon emissions at the national level, numerous global corporations have recently issued their own carbon reduction pledges. Such corporate “Net-Zero Club by…
The rapid transition to a decarbonized energy economy is widely believed to hinge on the rate of cost improvements for certain clean energy technologies, in particular renewable power and energy storage. This paper adopts the…
We study the role of financial flexibility on COVID-19 employment actions. Using daily data from March through May 2020 for 354 of the largest U.S. employers, we find that firms facing a negative demand shock were 28.8 percentage…
We examine the relationship between public firm disclosure and aggregate new business formation. Consistent with the notion that public company disclosures provide information spillovers that reduce the extent of uncertainty about…