In this study, we examine whether a country's implementation of major corporate governance reforms affects firms' cross-listing activities. Cross-listing is important in overcoming international investment barriers and thus it is worth investigating whether enhanced corporate governance at the country level contributes to the integration of international capital markets. Using a differencein-differences research design, we predict and find that following the implementation of corporate governance reforms in their home countries, firms are more likely to engage in cross-listing activities and tend to cross-list in host countries with stronger investor protection and more developed markets than those in countries with no reforms in the same period. The results from country-level cross-sectional tests indicate that this effect is greater for firms in home countries with weaker investor protection and less developed stock markets in the prereform period. The reforms also have a stronger effect on firms subject to less analyst following and greater external finance dependence. Finally, we find a stronger association between cross-listing activities and institutional ownership after the reforms. Taken together, this study increases understanding of the trade-off between cross-border capital supply and demand. Our finding suggests that country-level corporate governance plays an important role in facilitating the supply of cross-border capital, which in turn incentivizes firms to cross-list. Our study also offers policy implications for national stock exchanges and securities regulators by suggesting that countries without well-developed capital markets should strengthen their corporate governance to improve firms' ability to raise external financing and attract cross-border capital flows.

This study examines the effect of a conditional management earnings forecast mandate on voluntary disclosure and the properties of analyst forecasts in China, where firms are required to provide earnings forecasts when they expect to either make a loss, turn from loss into profit, or experience a large change in earnings. We find that firms' propensity to issue voluntary management earnings forecasts is higher when they anticipate the disclosure of mandatory management earnings forecasts in the future. This relation is stronger for government-controlled firms. We also find a significant improvement in the quality of analyst earnings forecasts (measured by forecast accuracy and dispersion) for firms that provide voluntary management earnings forecasts, while the disclosure of mandatory management earnings forecasts is negatively associated with analyst earnings forecast quality. We document that this differential effect on analyst earnings forecast quality is attributable to the higher quality of voluntary management earnings forecasts. Further analyses suggest that the positive effect of voluntary management earnings forecasts on analyst earnings forecast quality is larger for firms with a relatively weak existing information environment. Our findings suggest that the conditional mandatory disclosure of management earnings forecasts can incentivize managers to provide voluntary forecasts, and that these voluntary forecasts play a greater role than mandatory management forecasts in improving firms' external information environment in the Chinese capital market.

Exploiting a unique conditional disclosure mandate on management earnings forecasts (MEFs) in China, we examine the differential effects of voluntary and mandatory MEFs on the cost of debt. We find that firms providing voluntary MEFs have lower cost of debt than do mandatory forecasters and nonforecasters. The results of the channel analyses reveal that voluntary forecasters have greater commitment to voluntary MEFs in future periods than do mandatory forecasters and nonforecasters, and the precision, accuracy, and timeliness of MEFs are higher for voluntary forecasters than for mandatory forecasters. Additional analyses show that the differential effects of voluntary and mandatory MEFs on cost of debt are stronger for voluntary forecasters operating in opaque information environments, issuing high‐quality and confirming forecasts, controlled by private shareholders, and operating in highly competitive product markets. Overall, our results indicate that, compared with mandatory MEFs, voluntary MEFs are more informative for credit investors, particularly for firms facing greater information risk and operating uncertainty.

Based on evidence from nine countries that hosted the Olympic Games, we show that relative to firms domiciled in non-Olympics-hosting countries, firms domiciled in Olympics-hosting countries engage in more cross-listing in the years following the Olympics. The effect of hosting the Olympics on firms’ cross-listing activities is more pronounced for firms domiciled in host countries with better performance in the Games; for firms domiciled in countries hosting the Summer Olympics; and for domestic firms. We also find that cross-listing firms domiciled in an Olympics-hosting country tend to cross-list in foreign countries with a greater institutional distance from the host country after the Olympics. Finally, we document a positive effect of Olympics-hosting on the consequences of cross-listing. Taken together, our findings suggest that hosting the Olympics improves the international reputation of the host country, which helps firms domiciled in that country to overcome the liability of foreignness when making cross-listing decisions.