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The aim of the paper is to investigate the effect of labor strength on stock price crash risk and related moderating mechanisms.

To examine the relationship between labor unions and stock price crash risk and, more importantly, whether corporate governance moderates this relationship. Ordinary least squares (OLS), two-stage least squares, cross-sectional analyses, industry-level regressions and firm-level regressions are conducted.

The results suggest a negative impact of labor union strength on stock price crash risk. Further analysis suggests strong corporate governance mechanisms may mitigate the increased stock price crash risk in less-unionized firms.

Labor unions have a long-term horizon in the firm and have strong incentives to monitor managerial opportunism. However, labor unions may also increase financial reporting opacity and collude with managers to gain bargaining power in labor negotiations. The authors’ finding suggests that labor union strength is negatively associated with stock price crash risk. This finding is consistent with the notion that labor unions curb managerial opportunism in information disclosure, resulting in reduced crash risk. More importantly, the authors find corporate governance mitigates the negative impact of reduced unionization on crash risk, providing empirical support for recent regulatory efforts to strengthen corporate governance to prevent stock market crash.

The authors study how shareholder litigation risk impacts a firm’s decision of real earnings management (REM). This paper aims to shed light on how shareholder litigation risk impacts REM. The authors further explore how the intensifying effect varies systematically conditioning on the degree of information asymmetry and the strength of internal corporate governance.

In this study, the authors use the 1999 Ninth Circuit Court ruling as a quasi-experiment that reduces shareholder litigation risk to address endogeneity and establish a causal inference.

The difference-in-difference tests suggest lower shareholder litigation risk intensifies REM. In other words, higher litigation risk mitigates REM. Cross-sectional test results suggest the negative effect of decreased shareholder litigation is more pronounced when monitoring difficulty is higher, when information environment is more impoverished and when internal corporate governance is weaker. The negative effect is also stronger in firms with higher sensitivity to legal threats.

Protection of investors’ interest is the focus of corporate governance. Designed as an important corporate governance mechanism, shareholder litigation enables investors to pursue legal actions to recover their losses in the event of corporate misbehaviors. However, whether shareholder litigation is an effective corporate governance tool and beneficial to shareholders and firms is not without controversy. The authors contribute to the debate by providing evidence that supports the argument that shareholder litigation threat significantly disciplines REM, a form of costlier earnings management technique and myopic investment behavior.

This paper aims to introduce a high-temperature grease design method assisted by back propagation neural network (BPNN) and verify its application value.

First, the grease data sets were built by sorting out the base data of greases in a large number of literatures and textbooks. Second, the BPNN model was built, trained and tested. Then, the optimized BPNN model was used to search the unknown data space and find the composition of greases with excellent high-temperature performance. Finally, a grease was prepared according to the selected composition predicted by the model and the high-temperature physicochemical performance, high-temperature stability and tribological properties under different friction conditions were investigated.

Through high temperature tribology experiments, thermal gravimetric analysis and differential scanning calorimetry experiments, it is proved that the high temperature grease prepared based on BPNN has good high-temperature performance.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, a new method of designing and exploring high-temperature greases is successfully proposed, which is useful and important for the industrial applications.