We show that peer firms play an important role in shaping corporate earnings management de-cisions. To overcome identification issues in isolating peer effects, we use fund flow-induced selling pressure by passive open-end equity mutual funds as exogenous shocks to firms’ stock prices. Managers respond to such exogenous price shocks by adjusting earnings management policies. We then measure individual firms’ reactions to changes in earnings management at peer firms as a result of such exogenous price shocks. The documented peer effect in earnings management is not only statistically, but also economically significant. Our results are robust to alternative measures of fund flow-induced selling pressure and earnings management, and to estimating instrumental variables regressions in which we instrument peer firms’ earnings man-agement with mutual fund flow-induced selling pressure.
How does government debt affect long-run economic growth? A prominent strand of theoretical literature suggests that government debt has a negative effect on growth. Another strand argues that government debt can foster growth by enhancing the supply of liquid assets or collateral. We empirically investigate the liquidity channel of government debt and apply the difference-in-differences methodology of Rajan and Zingales (1998) on a sample of 28 manufacturing industries across 39 developing and developed countries. We provide evidence that industries with greater liquidity needs tend to grow disproportionately faster in countries with higher levels of government debt. The positive liquidity effect of government debt on industry growth stems from domestic debt, not external debt. We perform a battery of robustness checks and show that our results are robust to using instrumental variables and controlling for many competing channels.
