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AbstractPublic corruption in the government procurement process is rampant and its cost is huge, even among developed countries. Some scholars estimate that about 20%–30% of the values of government projects are lost due to public corruption. In this paper, we examine how public corruption impacts the allocation of U.S. federal contracts. Using the U.S. Department of Justice corruption convictions data and the federal contract data from 2000 to 2018, we find that firms located in more corrupt states receive more federal contract dollars, more important contracts in terms of their contributions to firm revenues, and contracts with higher visibility among federal contractors. We construct an influence/favoritism index that takes into account defense contracts, cost‐plus contracts, and multi‐year contracts, and document that the index is positively related to corruption levels. These results hold after we conduct several robustness tests, including 2SLS regressions, propensity‐score matching analysis, and using alternative corruption measures. Our empirical findings are consistent with the hypothesis that corruption plays an important role in how federal contracts are allocated.

Whether they know it or not, the legal rights and responsibilities of users of websites and services, including social media, are defined and controlled by the terms of service of these online service providers. But despite the importance of these provisions, studies have shown that users rarely review terms of service, or think about their meaning. This study took advantage of a major website's "simplification" of its terms of service to determine whether the changed language increased users' understanding of the intended meaning of the terms of service. Using the Elaboration Likelihood Model, we evaluate the effectiveness of simplification of terms of service as a method to encourage users' understanding on these terms.

High-quality environmental information disclosure is not only an effective way for the firm to fulfill its environmental responsibility and promote green development, but also an important governance mechanism to reduce the degree of information asymmetry between the firm's management and shareholders and alleviate the agency conflict. As an important shareholder of a firm, there are two different hypotheses about the influence of institutional investors on firm decision-making and behavior: monitor and collusion. Institutional investors are not homogeneous, and there are significant differences in the impact of different types of institutional investors on firm decision-making and behavior. We divide institutional investors into the stable institutional investors and the unstable institutional investors, using the data of listed firms in China's A-share heavy pollution industry between 2008 and 2020, and this study explores the effect of institutional investors' heterogeneity on environmental information disclosure behavior from the perspective of environmental information disclosure quality. Empirical evidence shows that institutional investors as a whole have a positively significant impact on environmental information disclosure quality. Further analysis shows that the stable institutional investors have positive impact on environmental information disclosure quality compared with the unstable institutional investors. After a series of robustness tests, the conclusion is still valid. The results of this paper show that institutional investors, especially the stable institutional investors, can effectively reduce the degree of information asymmetry, alleviate the agency conflict of the firm, play an active role in corporate governance, strengthen the main responsibility of firm ecological environment protection, and promote the green development of firm. The conclusion of this paper has important reference significance for the regulators to formulate policies to improve environmental information disclosure ...

Abstract: On Chinese social media, the stigmatization of homosexuals is tightly connected to the belief that they have a higher risk of contraction than others. However, scientists' estimation of such risks is selectively framed on media outlets, and could cause confusion about and even polarization around the topic. In the theoretical framework of motivated reasoning, the current study showcases a cognition-intention link in the processing of scientific information regarding homosexuals' high HIV/AIDS prevalence in China. An online survey experiment ( N = 695) using different emphasis frames of the findings from a scientific report shows that ad hoc identification with homosexuals' rights, and individualism, strongly moderates the direct effect of exposure to different messages on intention of message forwarding, and also the indirect effect mediated by the perception of scientists' expertise.