Are firms more resilient to systemic banking crises in economies with higher levels of social trust? Using firm-level data in 34 countries from 1990 through 2011, we find that liquidity-dependent firms in high-trust countries obtain more trade credit and suffer smaller drops in profits and employment during banking crises than similar firms in low-trust economies. The results are consistent with the view that when banking crises block the normal bank-lending channel, greater social trust facilitates access to informal finance, cushioning the effects of these crises on corporate profits and employment.

This study investigates whether financial data providers serve as information intermediaries in capital markets. To this end, I examine whether the timeliness of earnings information disseminated by First Call (Thomson Reuters) affects the market’s reaction to earnings announcements. I document that the immediate price and volume response is weaker and the post-earnings-announcement drift stronger for earnings news disseminated with a delay by First Call. To mitigate endogeneity concerns, I study the market reaction on the day of the delayed dissemination and show that a significant part of the stronger drift is clustered around this day.

Play as practice literature has long been dominated by studies on the serious play. Focusing on a play that develops in artificial settings and requires managerial intervention, these studies overlook other playful manifestations, which are employee-driven and situated in the natural work habitat. This paper extends current play as practice reflections by adopting the notion of informal play as an alternative to prevailing views that espouses the employee rather than the managerial perspective. Drawing upon insights from play and practice literature, we incorporate five practice-based constructs into the systematic analysis of informal play in the world of work. We advance an integrative framework that highlights the constitutive relationships between the retained constructs and acknowledges different enactments of informal play for generating productive outcomes or cynically resisting authority. A multi-domain agenda for future inquiry that may contribute to a more nuanced understanding of informal play as practice in organizations concludes the paper.

We examine whether sizable initial public offerings (IPOs) affect the whole market. Using a Chinese IPO sample, we find robust evidence that sizable IPOs depress the market price on not only the listing day but also the offering (subscription) day. The impact on the market is negatively correlated with IPO size on the listing day. However, this impact is largely transitory. The China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) often places a moratorium on IPOs to support the market, which seems ineffective as the negative IPO effect is transitory and moratoriums are not perceived as good news.

This article is motivated by certain issues for which, in current Business and Human Rights (BHR) discourse, largely framed in terms of the Ruggie reports, no satisfactory solutions have been found to date. These quandaries refer to (a) foundational matters: the link between human rights law and ethics; (b) normative force: the obligatoriness of human rights claims on corporations; and (c) scope and content of human rights claims on corporations. Turning to the virtue ethics and natural law (VENL) tradition, we encounter the following possible responses: (a) positive laws, such as those concerning human rights, ultimately require a basis in natural law; (b) although the public use of the coercive force of law belongs to the state alone, its private use by non-state actors such as individuals and corporations may be legitimate in some cases; and (c) practical wisdom is necessary in the proper interpretation and implementation of human rights claims on corporations, taking into account relevant contingencies. The blending of BHR discourse with the VENL tradition is best captured in modern Catholic Social Teaching (CST). Although historically CST has adopted the VENL language, engagement with social issues in the modern world has enabled it to reach an understanding with rights theory as well, particularly in connection with business and the economy.

This article examines whether investors receive compensation for holding crash-sensitive stocks. We capture the crash sensitivity of stocks by their lower-tail dependence (LTD) with the market based on copulas. We find that stocks with strong LTD have higher average future returns than stocks with weak LTD. This effect cannot be explained by traditional risk factors and is different from the impact of beta, downside beta, coskewness, cokurtosis, and Kelly and Jiang’s (2014) tail risk beta. Hence, our findings are consistent with the notion that investors are crash-averse.