Latest Research Publications

Using the introduction of high-speed rail (HSR) as an exogenous shock to costs of information acquisition, we show reductions in information-acquisition costs lead to (i) a significant increase in information production, evidenced by a higher frequency of analysts visiting portfolio firms and (ii) improvement in output quality, manifested in higher forecast accuracy and better recommendations. The effect is more pronounced for firms with information that is difficult to produce. Importantly, more information production is also associated with improved price efficiency. We corroborate these findings using a large-scale survey of financial analysts. Finally, both the empirical and survey results highlight the importance of soft information in analysts’ unique-information production.

We use loans that were extended to public firms through the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) as a laboratory to separate between favoritism and informational advantages in interpersonal ties between banks and firms. Because PPP loans are guaranteed by the government and banks do not need to carefully screen borrowers, this setting reduces information frictions, allowing us to quantify the effect of favoritism. We find that firms with personal ties to banks are more likely to obtain PPP loans. The role of personal ties weakens when firms are less opaque, but does not vary with banks' corporate governance. We also find that connected firms are more likely to return their loans to avoid regulatory scrutiny. Overall, we offer clean estimates of the role of favoritism in bank lending and highlight the unintended consequence of government programs that use the banking system to allocate capital.

This paper studies how minimum wage policies affect capital investment using the industrial census of manufacturing firms in China, where minimum wage policies vary across counties. Exploiting minimum wage policy discontinuities at county borders, we find that minimum wages increase capital investment. The investment response to minimum wages is stronger for firms that are labor-intensive, that have more room for technological improvement, and that cannot sufficiently pass on labor costs to consumers. A natural experiment based on county jurisdictional changes further assures the causal relationship.

In this paper we investigate the impact of external monitoring from the government on state-owned enterprise performance, using the variation in monitoring strength arising from a nationwide policy change and firms’ geographic location in China. We utilise a structural approach to estimate input prices and productivity separately at the firm level using commonly available production data. We show that enhanced external monitoring, as a key component of corporate governance, can substantially reduce managerial expropriation in procurement (proxied by input prices) and shirking in production management (proxied by productivity). The results suggest that government monitoring can be an effective policy instrument to improve state-owned enterprise performance.

We study trust building in credence-goods markets in a dynamic setting. When consumers' expected loss is low and it is efficient to fix only the more severe problem, there is no trade in the one-shot game. In the repeated game, an expert's honesty is monitored through consumers' rejection of his recommendations. The expert's profit in the optimal equilibrium weakly increases in the discount factor but does not achieve the first best, which contrasts sharply with the optimal equilibrium in experience-goods markets. The optimal equilibrium involves undertreatment if the expert is sufficiently patient, and overtreatment if he is moderately patient.

This study examines the effects of jurisdictions’ corporate taxes and other policies on firms’ headquarters (HQ) location decisions. Using changes in state corporate income tax rates across time and states as the setting, we find that a one-percentage-point increase in the HQ state corporate income tax rate increases the likelihood of firms relocating their HQ out of the state by 16.8%, and an equivalent decrease in the HQ state rate decreases the likelihood of HQ relocations by 9.1%. Exploiting the unique tax policy features within the state apportionment system lends strong support to the interpretation that taxation drives this effect. Our analyses also demonstrate that state income tax features affect the destination of the HQ move. We contribute to the literature on corporate decision making by showing how state income taxation affects a real corporate decision that has significant economic consequences for the company and the state.

The extant research has often examined the work-related experiences of corporate executives, but their off-the-job activities could be just as insightful. This study employs a novel proxy for the risky hobbies of chief executive officers (CEOs)—CEOs’ hobby of piloting a private aircraft—and investigates its effect on credit stakeholders’ evaluation of the firms led by the CEOs as reflected in bank loan contracting. Using a longitudinal data set on CEOs of large United States-listed firms across multiple industries between 1993 and 2010, we obtain strong evidence that bank loans to firms steered by CEOs who fly private jets as a hobby tend to incur a higher cost of debt, to be secured, to have more covenants, and to be syndicated. These effects are mainly driven by banks, which perceive such firms as having a higher default risk. These relationships become stronger when the CEO is more important to the firm and/or can exercise stronger control over decision making. Supplemented by field interviews, our results are also robust to various endogeneity checks using different experimental designs, the Heckman two-stage model, a propensity score-matching approach, a difference-in-differences test, and the impact threshold of confounding variables.

There is often considerable anxiety and conflicting advice concerning the benefits of presenting/being evaluated first. We thus investigate how expert evaluators vary in their evaluations of entrepreneurial proposals based upon the order in which they are evaluated. Our research setting is a premiere innovation fund competition in Beijing, China, where the prize money at stake is economically meaningful, and evaluators are quasi-randomly assigned to evaluate written grant proposals without the possibility of peer influence. This enables us to credibly recover a causal position effect. We also theorize and test how heterogeneity in evaluators’ prior (context-specific) judging experience moderates position effects. Overall, we find that a proposal evaluated first requires total assets in the top 10th percentile to merely equal the evaluation of a proposal in the bottom 10th percentile that is not evaluated first. Firm and evaluator fixed-effects models yield consistent findings. We consider evaluation design elements that may mollify these position effects in the discussion section.

Firms in the same networks tend to have similar corporate governance practices. However, disentangling peer effects, where governance practices propagate from one firm to another, from selection effects, where firms with similar preferences self-select into linked groups, is difficult to do. Studying board-interlocked firms, we utilize the staggered adoption of universal demand laws across states to identify and estimate causal peer effects in governance policies. We find support for the existence of peer effects in the adoption of antitakeover provisions. The impact of universal demand laws on the governance experience of interlocking directors likely explains these effects.