Book Description

"The core of the thesis includes three essays in empirical corporate finance. The first essay examines the relation between mandatory disclosure behavior and legal accountability. In this study, we treat the enactment of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) in 2002 as a regulatory event that increases the legal accountability of top executives and compute the filing tones for a large sample of Forms 10-Q and 10-K filings between 1994 and 2017 using textual analysis. We document that the changes in filing tones contain substantial information that is reflected promptly in the capital market. We also show that a structural break exists in the distribution of filing tones around SOX. Firms use a more negative tone in their quarterly mandatory disclosure after SOX. Interestingly, investors exhibit a stronger reaction to per unit change of filing tones during the post-SOX era and we show that changes in investors’ reactions are not merely driven by the systematic changes in tone distribution after SOX. We also document that filing tones are determined by common performance measures, but such relation is weakened after SOX. The second essay studies the impact of the exit of Venture Capitalists (VCs) on innovation by comparing VC backed IPO firms with the non-VC backed. VCs play a significant role in bringing new ventures public by providing financing and consistent monitoring. Prior literature has established mostly a positive correlation between VCs and firm innovation because VCs may preselect more innovative firms to begin with. This study hopes to provide evidence on causal inference with reasonable assumptions from a “reverse treatment” perspective by examining the change in innovation when VCs exit. We treat the initial public offering (IPO) as a proxy for VC’s exit since most VCs exit shortly after IPO due to their limited investment horizon. Using a difference-in-differences framework, we find that VC-backed firms experience a greater drop in Research and Development (R&D) intensity after IPO-exits when compared to those non-VC backed. The third essay revisits the long-debated relation between market competition and firm innovation. While traditionally competition is measured at the industry level with historical data, our study utilizes two new text-based measures of competitive threats developed by Hoberg et al. (2014) and Li et al. (2013) which are both firm-specific and forward-looking. We address the potential endogeneity concerns using instrumental variables along with the propensity score matching of firms that experience an exogenous shock from import competition with those that do not. Our results show that an increase in competition unambiguously promotes firm innovation"--