Chi Wan

• University of Massachusetts Boston

Initial coin offerings (ICOs) have emerged as a popular method to raise capital by startups. During the ICO process, issuers release white papers, which serve as the primary offering documents. Unlike traditional corporate disclosures, ICO disclosures are largely unregulated. We hypothesize that more-readable white papers reflect less information o...

Using a large sample over the period 1986 to 2017, we show that companies with higher exposure to climate change risk induced by sea-level rise (SLR) tend to acquire firms that are unlikely to be directly affected by SLR. We find that acquirers with higher SLR exposure experience significantly higher announcement-period abnormal stock returns. Anal...

We employ a sharp regression discontinuity design to identify the causal effects of investor-base disclosure (IB DISCLOSE) on funding outcomes and entrepreneurship success. Since February 2016, Kickstarter has disclosed IB information, namely, backer statistics including geographic locations and previous funding experience of the backers, once the...

We investigate whether firms’ ineffective internal control over financial reporting is associated with customer satisfaction, measured by product ratings on Amazon.com. Internal control weaknesses will likely corrupt the information environment, compromise coordination, and divert corporate resources to address the control deficiencies. Using a lar...

Human capital is a major impetus for technological innovation. We examine the relation between the technological dimension of product market competition and the disclosure of skill requirements in job postings. On the one hand, technological competition may raise the urgency of recruiting tech talent and make firms provide more specific skill requi...

Individual social responsibility is essential to achieving the sustainable development goals of the society, yet there has been very little research on whether and how social and cultural factors influence individual social responsibility. Using the Covid-19 pandemic as our empirical context, this research examines the relationship between social c...

We examine whether superior understanding of technological innovation is a source of mutual fund managers’ ability to garner positive abnormal returns. Consistent with our hypothesis, the inter-quintile annual net Carhart alpha spread for mutual funds sorted on changes in the technological similarity (TS) of their portfolio holdings is 282 basis po...

We show that social capital has a strong mitigating effect on financial adviser misconduct in the United States. Moreover, advisers who have committed misconduct are also more likely to relocate to counties with a relatively lower level of social capital than that of his previously residing county. These findings provide support for both the deterr...

We study how mutual fund managers gain an edge in selecting stocks in an era of globalization. We use textual analysis to construct a measure that captures a mutual fund's offshore exposure concentration through holding US multinational firms. We find that funds with a higher offshore concentration index (OCI) perform significantly better, with the...

This paper examines how credit risk spillovers affect corporate financial flexibility. We construct separate empirical proxies to disentangle the two channels of credit risk spillovers—credit risk contagion (CRC), where one firm's default increases the distress likelihood of another; and product market rivalry (PMR), where the same default strength...

We find that mutual funds holding a larger concentration of high gross profitability stocks generate better future performance. The outperformance of these funds is not driven by a profitability-related risk premium and is not a byproduct of fund managers’ exploitation of other well-known investment strategies. We show that fund managers who trade...

SYNOPSIS It is well documented that domestic investors have an information advantage over foreign investors. We utilize the market segmentation of Chinese A- and B-shares to disentangle the information sets of domestic versus foreign investors. We find that while domestic investors lead foreign investors in firm-specific information, the latter are...

This paper examines the joint effect of imports and inward foreign direct investment (iFDI), the two primary entry forms of foreign companies to the U.S. product market, on domestic firms’ capital investment decisions. We develop novel firm-level measures to gauge the impact of imports and iFDI. We show that increased import competition significant...

Rising intangible assets on corporate balance sheets around the world could limit borrowing capacity and consequently hinder growth if firms must preserve cash and forgo investment opportunities. We show that financial development lowers the sensitivity of cash holdings to tangible assets and promotes firm growth. We also find that sectors with a s...

We introduce a firm-specific measure of the technological aspect of competition—technological peer pressure—and examine firm-initiated product development-related press releases. We argue that empirical examinations of the theorized negative relation between competition and disclosure require the type of voluntary disclosure to be relevant to the d...

This paper investigates the impact of a firm’s annual report readability and ambiguous tone on its borrowing costs. We find that firms with larger 10-K file sizes and a higher proportion of uncertain and weak modal words in 10-Ks have stricter loan contract terms and greater future stock price crash risk. Our results suggest that the readability an...

We estimate the dynamics of recommendations by financial analysts, uncovering the determinants of inertia in their recommendations. We provide overwhelming evidence that analysts revise recommendations reluctantly, introducing frictions to avoid frequent revisions. More generally, we characterize the sources underlying the infrequent revisions that...

This paper analyzes the roles of idiosyncratic risk and firm-level conditional skewness in determining cross-sectional returns. It is shown that the traditional EGARCH estimates of conditional idiosyncratic volatility may bring significant finite sample estimation bias in the presence of non-Gaussianity. We propose a new estimator that has more rob...

This study examines the effect of technology spillovers on firms‘ cash holdings. It finds that firms facing greater technology spillovers hold higher cash balances. This effect is more pronounced among financially constrained firms and for firms that are likely to benefit more from diffused technology, e.g., those that have newer patents, are more...

This paper investigates the impact of a firm’s annual report readability on its borrowing cost. We find that low readability is associated with stricter loan contract terms, especially for firms with greater informational asymmetry. Furthermore, poor readability is positively related to a firm’s future stock price crash risk. The results are robust...

This paper uses an enterprise-population-level dataset to investigate the link between globalization and gender inequality in the Chinese labor market. We find that foreign and exporting firms employ more female workers than domestic nonexporters. Foreign participation and export orientation within the same region and industry significantly encoura...

This study examines how competition for innovations in technology space and product market space shapes firms’ cash holdings and dividend payouts. We find strong evidence that both technology spillovers and product market rivalry induce higher cash holdings. Furthermore, our results indicate that firm cash holdings are more responsive to shocks in...

We use MCMC methods to estimate a dynamic model of financial analysts' recommendations. We find overwhelming evidence that analysts acquire information with persistent valuation consequences that the econometrician does not observe, and that analysts revise recommendations reluctantly, introducing frictions to avoid frequent revisions. Estimates su...

This paper investigates the effect of corporate globalization on bank loan contracts, as reflected in both price and non-price loan terms. We show that globally diversified firms receive more favorable valuation from creditors than domestic firms do. Specifically, we find strong evidence that global firms are charged lower loan rates, and are spare...

This paper empirically investigates the impact of macroeconomic uncertainty on the spreads of individual firms ’ credit default swaps (CDS). While existing literature acknowledges the importance of the levels of macroeconomic factors in determining CDS spreads, we find that the second moments of these factors—macroeconomic uncertainty—have signific...

In the absence of discrimination, there should be no wage-productivity differentials as relative wages should be equal to the relative marginal productivity levels of workers. This paper investigates the role of globalization on the structure and evolution of gender differentials in China by simultaneously estimating demand-side wage and productivi...