Lei (Liora) Lei 雷蕾

Abstract: We study the impact of demand shocks on product quality in the hospital sector. Exploiting staggered paid sick leave mandates as plausibly exogenous increases in healthcare demand, we document significant improvements in hospital quality across multiple dimensions. These effects are not explained by preventive care behavior, changes in patient severity, or local socioeconomic conditions. Instead, the evidence supports a financial channel: demand shocks improve hospitals’ financial conditions, lower external financing costs, and increase investment and employment. Quality improvements are more pronounced among financially constrained hospitals and hospitals with stronger governance that allocates these additional financial resources to quality-improving uses.

Abstract: We study whether public firm disclosure and its dissemination improve outcomes for retail investors in markets that do not produce timely disclosures themselves. Retail investors’ significant information-processing costs mean that more public disclosure need not reduce their informational disadvantage. We examine IPO-induced disclosure spillovers in the municipal bond secondary market, an opaque over-the-counter setting with weak issuer disclosure. Local IPOs generate mandatory disclosure and attract analyst and media coverage that can lower processing costs. Using restricted-access MSRB data, we find that round-trip dealer markups on retail-sized trades decline by 16 basis points after a local IPO, with muted institutional effects. Declines are larger when IPO-related disclosures are richer and issuer environments are poorer, smaller when processing frictions are higher, and larger when dealers' ex ante informational advantage is greater, but mitigated when dealer market power is stronger. Mandatory disclosure and its dissemination can thus compress dealer information rents and lower retail transaction costs beyond the disclosing firm.

Abstract: We identify firms' major green product activity from trademark filings and examine how equity markets value commercialization-stage green innovations. Firms with new green trademarks in their core business exhibit stronger future operating performance and higher stock returns, while analysts underestimate earnings. Return predictability is concentrated in the first year and stronger among firms with weaker environmental profiles and greater regulatory exposure, valuation difficulty, and when environmental issues are less salient. Overall, we show that markets gradually incorporate value-relevant information from green product commercialization, with underreaction stronger when green product activity represents a meaningful green transition or is difficult to evaluate.