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Gija is a traditional language of the East Kimberley in the north-west of Australia.It is a landscape of weathered hills hugged by spinifex, startling rocky outcrops, hidden waterholes and dry riverbeds that turn to raging torrents in the wet season.

This study shows that the Securities and Exchange Commission's (SEC) enforcement intensity toward the foreign firms under its jurisdiction has increased dramatically over the past two decades. Because enforcement events signify an increased threat of future enforcement, I examine the stock returns of foreign firms not targeted by the SEC during windows around enforcement actions that target foreign firms. This design captures the net effects of public enforcement and helps to rule out omitted variables as alternative explanations, because other factors would have to align with enforcement events that do not occur in an obvious pattern (and are therefore unlikely to map onto other news). Nontarget firms experience positive stock returns during the event windows, which is consistent with enforcement constraining the risks of expropriation. The cross-sectional pattern in returns reveals greater returns for firms from weak home legal environments. Finally, consistent with the market adjusting to a new enforcement regime, the magnitude of event returns declines over time. Overall, SEC enforcement is associated with increases in the value of foreign firms, supporting the premise of the legal bonding hypothesis.

Tax audits are a necessary component of the tax system, but policymakers and others have expressed concerns about their potentially adverse real effects. Understanding the causal effects of tax audits has been hampered by lack of data and because typically tax audits are not randomly assigned. We use administrative data from random tax audits of small businesses to examine the real effects of being subject to a tax audit. We find that audited firms are more likely to go out of business following the audit. The effect is concentrated in firms that underreport their taxes, although we find some evidence that the administrative costs of an audit also negatively affect firm survival. Among firms that continue as going concerns, we find evidence that audits have adverse effects on future revenues but no effect on future wages, employment, or investment. Finally, we find that tax audits have side benefits, causing firms to make changes to improve their tax efficiency.

In traditional financial markets, front-running is a well-structured phenomenon. It represents a form of privileged actors utilizing knowledge or power advantages to extract undue profit at the cost of other stakeholders. Various mitigation strategies have emerged, ranging from market design to regulatory measures. More recently, a similar and substantially richer variety of means to gain unethical profit from power asymmetries has appeared in the context of blockchain-based decentralized applications. This phenomenon is called “maximal extractable value” (MEV). Despite the decentralized nature and inherent transparency of blockchain ledgers, MEV is particularly prevalent and challenging to mitigate. While related work in computer science and algorithmic game theory has already identified several different ways in which MEV manifests in decentralized finance (DeFi) and outlined partial solution approaches, a discussion of its impacts in the information systems (IS) domain is still absent. A holistic definition of MEV and how it can be exploited is necessary for the discussion of its potential implications for blockchain-based IS for businesses and public institutions. This paper conducts a systematic literature review to close this gap. It consolidates the diverging definitions of MEV and provides a categorization of the different ways in which it can manifest. As such, we synthesize and review the existing state of knowledge on MEV and point to undiscovered areas relevant to decentralized electronic markets in the form of a research agenda.

This article analyses the legal framework of commercial usage, as well as its use in commercial transactions directly or as a tool for interpreting legal norms and contractual terms. Commercial usages play a vital role in the unification of private law; this unification is high priority. The harmonization of international private law, especially trade law (commercial law), is an objective of many international organizations of global importance. Thus, having established that commercial usages exist as the relevant legal framework, the correct use of this legal framework should be the current focus of legal and related research. The purpose of this article is to provide a comprehensive analysis of the application of commercial usages by evaluating current effective legal documents and current legal practice, especially in Latvian court` judgments to formulate an opinion on the application of commercial usages in Latvia. The research highlights the necessity for broader utilization of commercial usages to advance commercial law development and facilitate the international unification of legal regulations for commercial transactions. This, in turn, would contribute to enhancing cross-border legal predictability and enforcement. The research is based on logical-analytical and descriptive scientific methods, incorporating historical and systemic approaches, as well as generalization of professional experience. The basis of the study is the analysis of various resources and legal acts, as well as observations. Techniques for interpreting legal norms are based on grammatical, historical, systemic, and teleological methods. This research underscores the significance of integrating commercial usages into legal frameworks to improve legal certainty in commercial transactions. It also offers recommendations for refining the definition of commercial usages in Latvian law to ensure consistency and foster unification with international standards.

This study focuses on the analysis of cryptocurrency regulatory developments in Europe. The aim is to review national crypto-legislation in Europe and the EU's latest initiative to create designated regulatory instruments for the crypto-economy. This study assessed whether the European Union's Regulation on Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) would have the intended effect. Drawing on the results of a survey of crypto experts from five European countries, this study evaluated the effectiveness of current regulation across Europe and how it can be improved to reduce financial crimes. The findings show that a unified national legal framework for regulating transactions with crypto assets does not exist in European countries. Current crypto regulations are dictated by anti-money laundering recommendations. This study provides suggestions for improving MiCA regulation. The article offers recommendations for an international regulatory standard for crypto assets and insights for increasing efficiency in regulating DeFi, NFTs, and smart contracts.

In recent years, a number of countries have strengthened their anti-corruption laws. Some of these laws apply to foreign firms, including those based in the United States. Considering, however, that the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) is regarded as the most powerful anti-corruption regime in the world, a key question arises: Do foreign anti-corruption laws affect US firms? Using US multinational firms’ differential exposure to the extraterritorial jurisdiction of the 2010 United Kingdom Bribery Act (UKBA), this study provides evidence suggesting that they do. Following the UKBA’s adoption, US firms subject to its jurisdiction curb their business in high-corruption-risk countries, relative to their unexposed US peers. This result is more pronounced for firms with greater bribery exposure and enforcement risk and passes a battery of placebo and robustness tests. These findings suggest that foreign anti-corruption laws produce incremental regulatory costs for US firms by raising the potential for multijurisdictional enforcement. As policymakers worldwide deliberate on approaches to reduce cross-border corruption, this evidence aligns with the view that enacting extraterritorial laws can enhance the effectiveness of anti-corruption regulation in the global economy.

We investigate corporate transparency, defined as the availability of firm-specific information to those outside publicly traded firms. We conceptualize corporate transparency within a country as output from a multifaceted system whose components collectively produce, gather, validate, and disseminate information. We factor analyze a range of measures capturing countries' firm-specific information environments, isolating two distinct factors. The first factor, interpreted as financial transparency, captures the intensity and timeliness of financial disclosures, and their interpretation and dissemination by analysts and the media. The second factor, interpreted as governance transparency, captures the intensity of governance disclosures used by outside investors to hold officers and directors accountable. We investigate whether these factors vary with countries' legal/judicial regimes and political economies. Our main multivariate result is that the governance transparency factor is primarily related to a country's legal/judicial regime, whereas the financial transparency factor is primarily related to political economy.

Using a unique firm-level survey database covering 54 countries, we investigate the effect of financial, legal, and corruption problems on firms' growth rates. Whether these factors constrain growth depends on firm size. It is consistently the smallest firms that are most constrained. Financial and institutional development weakens the constraining effects of financial, legal, and corruption obstacles and it is again the small firms that benefit the most. There is only a weak relation between firms' perception of the quality of the courts in their country and firm growth. We also provide evidence that the corruption of bank officials constrains firm growth.

A fully committed sender seeks to sway a collective adoption decision through designing experiments. Voters have correlated payoff states and heterogeneous thresholds of doubt. We characterize the sender-optimal policy under unanimity rule for two persuasion modes. Under general persuasion, evidence presented to each voter depends on all voters' states. The sender makes the most demanding voters indifferent between decisions, while the more lenient voters strictly benefit from persuasion. Under individual persuasion, evidence presented to each voter depends only on her state. The sender designates a subgroup of rubber-stampers, another of fully informed voters, and a third of partially informed voters. The most demanding voters are strategically accorded high-quality information.