Lilian Ng

This study shows that competition drives corporate innovation under intense environmental regulatory pressure. Using the nonattainment status of U.S. counties as an exogenous variation in regulation, we find that competition spurs green innovation as firms respond to stricter policies. Firms are particularly motivated to innovate in clean technology when operating in pollution-intensive industries, facing high relocation costs, and possessing a strong history of innovation. Regulation-driven green innovation allows firms to differentiate their products, enhance their environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reputation, and attract more corporate customers, leading to higher sales growth, increased market share, and improved profitability, although not necessarily higher valuation. Stricter regulations in competitive environments not only curb pollution but also serve as a catalyst for sustainable long-term innovation. These findings emphasize the vital role of environmental regulations in promoting sustainable practices and operational benefits, underscoring the importance of well-designed policies to drive long-term economic and environmental progress.

Analyzing the complex financial landscape of multi-segment conglomerates requires a more nuanced approach than that required for single-segment firms. This paper reveals that conglomerates strategically enhance their transparency by voluntarily disclosing more information to compensate for their business complexity. This finding is particularly pronounced when there is an increased demand for information from stakeholders and analysts or when the executive pay-performance sensitivity is higher. By strategically embracing transparency, conglomerates transform the complexities inherent in their financial reporting into a catalyst for higher valuation and lower capital costs. Overall, our study demonstrates that multi-segment firms tactically deploy voluntary disclosure to navigate their intricate business environment effectively.

Reliance on global outsourcing has become an economic imperative for many major corporations worldwide, but at the same time, it has brought substantial risks and complexities to these firms. This study employs novel international supply chain data to examine whether global outsourcing of goods or services shapes US corporate disclosure policies. Our main results suggest a negative impact of global outsourcing exposure on voluntary disclosure, and several identification tests further support this baseline evidence. We find that the adverse effect on disclosure is more pronounced when institutional differences are more significant between the United States and foreign suppliers’ countries and when US firms face higher litigation risks. However, the effect weakens when investors and stakeholders demand more information. Collectively, our study provides new insights into the economic implications of outsourcing globally from an information disclosure perspective.

This study evaluates the interactions between, and informativeness of, insider trading and analyst recommendations. We find that analyst recommendations significantly affect subsequent insider trading, but not vice versa. Surprisingly, in aggregate, insiders buy more shares following analyst downgrades and sell more shares following upgrades. This pattern persists even after controlling for analysts’ momentum and insiders’ contrarian trading preferences. Analysts, in contrast, do not systematically take into account insider trading when revising their recommendations. More importantly, we show that these two information signals complement each other although insider buying could be a singularly strong signal that substitutes the informativeness of analyst recommendations under certain circumstances. Overall, our findings highlight the important dynamics and financial market consequences between the two crucial groups of information providers.

This study exploits a complex information setting of a network of customer-supplier relationships to test whether short sellers pay attention to corporate news to act upon this news across the supply chain. We measure revealed short seller attention by using the link between a customer’s news announcement return and the abnormal short selling of its supplier’s stock. Results suggest that short sellers are attentive to news of customers to short their suppliers’ stocks and that this short selling behavior strengthens with the intensity of SEC Edgar filing searches for both the customer and the supplier. Short sales of suppliers’ stocks upon customer news announcements predict the suppliers’ negative future stock returns, suggesting that short sellers’ attention in a complicated information setting of customer-supplier links allows exploiting profitable trading opportunities.

We propose a new approach to identifying drivers of economic and financial integration, separately, and across emerging and developed countries. Our advanced machine learning technique allows for nonlinear relationships, corrects for over-fitting, and is less prone to noise. It also can tackle a large number of highly correlated explanatory variables and controls for multicollinearity. Results suggest that general economic growth, increasing international trade, and contained population growth have helped emerging countries catch up to the level of the economic integration of developed countries. However, slow financial development and a high level of investment riskiness have hindered the speed of emerging countries’ financial integration. Furthermore, the results suggest that integration is a gradual process and is not driven by cyclical or transitory events.

Market integration is a canonical topic in international finance. The question of whether and to what extent markets are integrated with the global economy has motivated one of the largest literature in this field. Given the vast literature, this survey focuses only on equity market integration and provides an overview of its theoretical and empirical research. It reviews the evolution of various approaches employed in studying market integration. This survey discusses the recent empirical findings on cross-sectional and time-series dynamics of integration across developed and emerging markets. It also describes the empirical estimation of three current measures of market integration and discusses their limitations. Finally, the survey provides a few future directions for this line of research.

We propose a simple metric to measure two aspects of market integration, namely, economic integration (defined as a common cash-flow dynamic) and financial integration (defined as a common risk-pricing dynamic) and then examine their evolution through time while controlling for volatility. We find that developed (DEV) countries exhibit greater degrees of financial and economic integration than emerging (EMG) markets. Although the financial integration gap between these markets remains large throughout the sample period, the EMG economies are catching up with their DEV counterparts in recent years; their level of economic integration has reached that of DEV countries.