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Does proprietary knowledge protection (PKP) spur or hinder the product-market performance of new firms? Exploiting the staggered adoptions of the inevitable disclosure doctrine by U.S. State Courts, which enhance PKP, we show that treated firms increase industry-adjusted sales growth by 2% compared to control firms. The effect is concentrated among small and young firms and increases with the scope of proprietary knowledge and rivals' access to external finance. PKP encourages firms to develop new products and stimulates initial public offering activity. Our results suggest that PKP alleviates predation risk associated with "deep-pocket" rivals by allowing firms to maintain competitive advantages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although risk management is widely regarded as an important topic within supply chain (SC) management, little research studies the contagious effect of risk factors along SC networks. By using stock price crashes as an indicator of risk factors, our study reveals that stock price crash risk can be transmitted from major customers to suppliers with a delay of up to two weeks. We show that the information opacity of suppliers is a factor that potentially contributes to the delayed crash contagion. We also find that the contagion effect becomes more pronounced as the importance of customers increases. Moreover, customer operational incidents have a more pronounced contagion effect on suppliers compared to customer financial incidents. Additionally, we find that suppliers tend to take strategic measures following the stock price crashes of their major customers, including diversifying their customer base, enhancing operational efficiency, and improving product quality. However, among these actions, only the improvement of operational efficiency effectively mitigates the adverse impact of customer stock price crashes on suppliers. Overall, our findings provide new insight into the distribution of risk factors across SC networks, highlighting the critical role of operational improvements in bolstering the resilience of firms to SC risks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the agency implications of increased disclosure using a regulatory change in the mutual fund industry as an experimental setting. This quasi-natural experiment mandated more frequent portfolio disclosure, which we show imposes managerial skill-reassessment risks from investors on funds with high relative performance volatility. In turn, this risk translates into greater agency costs to investors. We show that high-volatility funds, relative to low-volatility funds, responded to the increased skill-reassessment risk after regulation with an increase in management fees and a decrease in risk taking. These actions get transmitted to fund investors in the form of inferior net performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We document a strong negative relation between aggregate corporate investment and conditional equity premium estimated from direct stock market risk measures. Consistent with the investment‐based asset pricing model, the comovement with conditional equity premium fully accounts for aggregate investment's market return predictive power. Similarly, conditional equity premium is a significant determinant of classic Tobin's q measure, although q has much weaker explanatory power for aggregate investment possibly because of its measurement errors. Moreover, the positive relation between aggregate investment and investor sentiment documented in previous studies reflects the fact that both variables correlate closely with conditional equity premium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study shows that skilled labor‐intensive firms have lower dividend payouts. A one standard deviation increase in skilled labor intensity on average results in a 0.74 percentage point decline in the propensity to pay dividends and a 0.72 percentage point decrease in the dividend payout ratio. Our evidence suggests that greater labor adjustment costs (LACs) of skilled labor increase future cash flow uncertainty, which discourages managers from paying dividends. Consistently, we find that an exogenous increase (decrease) in LACs following the shock of 2017 H‐1B policy changes (the shock of 2005 Hurricane Katrina) leads treated firms to lower (heighten) their dividend payouts. Collectively, these findings indicate a strong dampening effect of LACs on corporate dividend payouts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Change in 10‐K file size robustly and negatively predicts future stock returns. The documented return predictability reflects mainly information content of 10‐K file size change on future cash flow news. We examine whether this return predictability derives from managers' risk disclosures or disclosure obfuscation. We find that the return predictability increases in future return horizon. It is driven by positive file size changes and is stronger for firms with high information asymmetry. It is stronger when managers have more "skin in the game." It persists even when investor attention is high. It derives from the component of file size change that cannot be explained by business fundamentals. Although word count changes in specific 10‐K items can predict future stock returns, word count change in Item 1A, the risk disclosure section, has no return predictability. Our findings are broadly consistent with the managerial disclosure obfuscation explanation and suggest that lengthier 10‐K disclosure, to the extent it is used by managers to obfuscate bad news, does not necessarily benefit shareholders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although many studies show that the presence of institutional investors facilitates the incorporation of accounting information into financial markets, the evidence of informed trading by institutions is rather limited in the extant literature. We address these inconsistent findings by proposing PC_ NII, percentage changes in the number of a stock's institutional investors, as a novel informed trading measure. PC_ NII is better able to detect informed trading than are changes in institutional ownership ( Δ IO)-the measure commonly used in previous studies-because (i) entries and exits are usually triggered by substantive private information and (ii) only a small fraction of institutions have superior information. As conjectured, PC_ NII subsumes the information content of Δ IO and other institutional trading and herding measures in the forecast of stock returns, and its strong predictive power for stock returns reflects mainly its close correlation with future earnings surprises. We also show that PC_ NII helps address empirical issues that require a reliable measure of institutional informed trading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]