PUBLICATIONS
“Rent Extraction Amid Borrowers’ Adversity: Evidence from Activist Short Sellers’ Attacks” (first author) (co-authored with Jeong-Bon Kim (Simon Fraser University), Luc Paugam [HEC Paris] & Herve Stolowy [HEC Paris]) [“Review of Finance,” 2025, Vol. 29, No. 5, pp. 1537–1585]
“Foreign institutional ownership and the choice between public and private debt” with Tsang Albert (York University, Toronto), and Hu Jinshuai (Xiamen University, China) [“Journal of International Accounting Research,” 2019, Vol. 18, No. 2, pp. 31-64]
WORKING PAPERS
“Does MiFID II Increase US Retail Investors’ Reliance on Rounded Analyst Consensus Recommendations? Evidence from Regression Discontinuity” with Franco Wong (University of California Irvine) & Stacey Choy (University of California Urbana Champaign)
“Signal or Noise? Mutual Fund Reactions to Rounded Alternative Data” with Massimo Massa (INSEAD), Vickie Tang (Georgetown) & Prince Asamoah (CityU HK)
“Do Analyst Forecast Errors Originate Upstream in the Information Supply Chain?” with Vickie Tang (Georgetown) & Prince Asamoah (CityU HK)
“Individual Mortgage Lending, Public Corruption, Race, and Gender: Evidence from Local Corruption Crackdowns,” with Roger M. White (Arizona State University), Arthur Morris (HKUST) and J. Han Stice (George Mason University)
“Money in Local Politics, Mortgage Fraud and Subprime Lending,” with Roger M. White (Arizona State University), Arthur Morris (HKUST) and J. Han Stice (George Mason University)
“Wisdom of Crowds along the Supply Chain: Causal Evidence from Trade Credit,” with Franco Wong (University of California Irvine), Jeong-Bon Kim (Simon Fraser University), & Vickie Tang (Georgetown)
“Autocorrelated Accruals and Fraud Detection” with André A. F. De Moura (FGV EAESP, Brazil)
“Prospectus Disclosure, Corporate Debt Choice and Political Costs: Theory and Evidence” with Kim Eunhee (Baruch College, CUNY), and Yi Cheong Heon (Caritas Institute of Higher Education, HK)
“Wisdom of Crowds as a Verification Tool in Bank Lending: Evidence from Borrowers’ Customer Tweets” with Jeong-Bon Kim (Simon Fraser University) and Vickie Tang (Georgetown University)
“Does Alternative Data Tilt Bargaining Power in Relationship Lending? Evidence from Borrowers’ Premium Customer Base” with Fred Asante (Cornell University)
“Corporate Political Connectedness and Accounting Quality: A Quasi-Natural Experiment” (Chapter I of Dissertation & Rookie Job Market Paper):
-Presented at the following places: Miami Accounting PhD Rookie Recruiting & Research Camp (2018); City University of Hong Kong (2018); Tulane University (2019); Yale SOM Accounting Recruitment Conference (2019); HEC Paris (2019); and Chinese University of Hong Kong (2019).
SUMMARY: To curb the influence of money in politics, a number of townships, cities, counties, and states across the U.S. have recently passed measures, resolutions, ordinances, and laws modeled on the American Anti-Corruption Act ("AACA"), which aims to: (1) "make it illegal to purchase political influence," and (2) "end secret money" (https://anticorruptionact.org/). I exploit these staggered events—occurring between 2014 (the first event year) and 2017—as exogenous negative shocks to both observable and unobservable affiliations with politicians, and provide new causal evidence on the effect of political connection on financial reporting. Using a difference-in-differences design for the 2010-2018 quarterly reporting period, I find that, relative to firms in non-adopting locations, firms in adopting locations have higher accounting quality (as proxied by several non-directional measures of accruals). I then focus on target beating (as a specific type of managerial incentive) and find that, relative to control firms, treated firms are also less likely to: (1) use income-increasing accruals to meet/beat analyst earnings forecasts, and (2) meet/beat analyst earnings targets by up to one cent. Finally, I show that the stock market responds favorably to this ex-post enhancement in the quality of earnings, which also culminates in stock prices better capturing information about future earnings and cash flows. These results imply that anti-corruption laws discipline opportunistic reporting and enhance earnings informativeness.
DOWNLOAD PAPER: Latest version | First version (available at the Yale University conference website: https://som.yale.edu/event/2019/01/2019-yale-som-accounting-recruiting-conference)