Research

[1] “Corporate Political Connectedness and Accounting Quality: A Quasi-Natural Experiment” (Chapter I of Dissertation & 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)

[2] “Foreign institutional ownership and the choice between public and private debt” with Tsang Albert (York University, Toronto), and Hu Jinshuai (Xiamen University, China)

- Presented at the following places: City University of Hong Kong (2017); AAA IAS Midyear Meeting, Long Beach (2018); Asian Finance Assoc. Annual Mtg., Tokyo (2018)

- Journal of International Accounting Research, 2019

[3] “Shielding from political corruption and the choice between public and private debt: Theory and evidence” with Yi Cheong Heon (CityU HK), and Kim Eunhee (CityU HK)

- Presented at the following places: CAAA Annual Meeting, Calgary (2018); AAA Annual Meeting, Washington DC ( 2018)

[4] “Hardening Soft Information in Bank Lending: Evidence from Customer-generated Product Information on Twitter” with Jeong-Bon Kim (CityU HK) and Vickie Tang (Georgetown University)

- Presented at the following places: University of Zurich, Switzerland (2018)