UC Irvine

This dissertation consists of three essays on empirical financial economics. The first essay, “External Litigation Risk and Corporate ES Performance: Evidence from Federal Judge Ideology”, explores how firms’ environmental and social (ES) performance are affected by external ES litigation risk, proxied by judge political ideology. The second essay, “Local Environmental Beliefs and Corporate Environmental Performance”, which was co-authored with Yuhai Xuan and Hong Wu, investigates the effect of local environmental beliefs on US establishments’ environmental performance and on firms’ pollution reallocation decisions. The third essay, “Information on Collateral Value and Bank Mortgage Lending”, studies the US residential property market and the effect of collateral information advantages on banks’ lending decisions.