About

April Klein is a Professor of Accounting and the KPMG Faculty Fellow at New York University Stern School of Business. She serves as the Director of the Vincent C. Ross Institute of Accounting Research. Professor Klein teaches a joint MBA – NYU Law School class in Financial Accounting and Finance, as well as a PhD research course in corporate governance and regulation. Her primary research areas include the board of directors, hedge fund activism, equity analysts, and ESG, with a focus on cyber risk, board diversity, and the influence of financial institutions on their investees’ ESG policies. She has published extensively in leading academic journals across Accounting, Finance, and Law. Professor Klein has been with NYU Stern since 1987 and has also taught at Columbia Law School, Baruch College, and Warwick Business School. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Economics and Mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania, an MBA, and a PhD in Finance from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Finance
• Business
• Law
• Accounting
• International trade
• Engineering

Selected publications

• The Market Value of Pay Gaps: Evidence from EEO-1 Disclosures

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Investors’ response to the #MeToo movement: does corporate culture matter?

  Review of Accounting Studies · 2022 · 57 citations

  • Political Science
  • Accounting
  • Business

  Abstract This paper provides evidence that the #MeToo movement revised investors’ beliefs about the costs (benefits) of fostering an exclusive (inclusive) culture, as reflected by the absence (presence of a critical mass) of women directors in the board room. Tracking a timeline of events associated with the #MeToo movement that begin with the Harvey Weinstein exposé in October 2017 in the New York Times , we document contrasting market reactions to the movement depending on the existing culture of the firm. Firms that historically excluded women from their board experienced a negative market response as momentum for the cause increased, whereas investors responded favorably to firms that historically embraced the inclusion of women on their boards. In contrast, we do not detect differences in the market’s response to randomly generated pseudo-events during the same time frame when comparing firms with exclusive and inclusive cultures. In the context of increased regulator attention to board gender diversity, as well as the ESG activist campaigns by large institutional investors, our study documents a shift in investors’ beliefs about the risks associated with sexual misconduct and about the value of having women in the boardroom shaping the culture of the firm.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Effects of Credible Voluntary Disclosures: Institutional Investor Engagement and Investees' ESG Performances

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2022-01-01 · 12 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Across the Pond: How <scp>US</scp> Firms' Boards of Directors Adapted to the Passage of the General Data Protection Regulation†

  Contemporary Accounting Research · 2021 · 21 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Business
  • Accounting

  ABSTRACT One of the prime responsibilities of the board of directors is to understand and oversee its firm's risk profile. We exploit a recent European Union (EU) regulation, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), as a quasi‐exogenous shock to the cyber risk landscape to assess whether boards of US firms changed their focus and governance structures to deal with this new challenge. The GDPR encompasses a sweeping set of regulations aimed at protecting EU citizens from unwanted uses of their personal Internet data. Although an EU regulation, the GDPR applies to all US public firms with at least one EU user. Adopting a difference‐in‐differences methodology, we use firms that already fall under a US data privacy regulation as a control group and find that boards of treated US firms, on average, increase their focus on cyber risk, add more directors with cyber/IT expertise, and more frequently assign cyber risk oversight to the board or to a board committee. In cross‐sectional tests, we show that these changes are positively associated with a firm's ex ante cyber risk, but are unrelated to whether a firm had a large EU presence, suggesting a more global reaction to the GDPR. In addition, we examine some of the consequences of these board changes. We find boards that promptly responded by changing their board focus, expertise, and monitoring assignment of cyber risk around the passage of GDPR had fewer future cyberattacks/data breaches and less related media attention. Our findings suggest that, on average, American corporate boards promptly responded to changes in the cyber risk environment in ways that reduced their firms' overall future cyber risk. Our results have implications for the efficacy and flexibility of US corporate boards to respond to unexpected changes in risk.

  PublisherDOI

• Across the Pond: The Impact of the GDPR on the Resiliency of U.S. Firms’ Board of Directors

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2020-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Corporate Tax Planning and Political Costs: Peer Effects of Foreign Institutional Ownership

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2019-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Is There a Quid Pro Quo between Hedge Funds and Sell-Side Equity Analysts?

  The Journal of Portfolio Management · 2019-08-30 · 9 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In this article, the authors posit a quid pro quo in economic benefits between sell-side equity analysts and large hedge fund managers. They show that large hedge funds opportunistically trade one to four days prior to the publication of a recommendation change, a finding consistent with flow of information from analysts to hedge funds. Next, the authors demonstrate that in return for the information provided, analysts benefit from (1) better external evaluations and (2) higher trading commissions and fees for their brokerage firm. Notably, pre-trading occurs only when the analyst issuing the recommendations has a high external evaluation and the analyst’s brokerage house is a prime broker to the hedge fund. <b>TOPICS:</b>Manager selection, fundamental equity analysis, portfolio construction

  PublisherDOI

• Investors’ Response to the #MeToo Movement: Does Corporate Culture Matter?

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2019-01-01 · 29 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Seeking Out Non-Public Information: Sell-Side Analysts and the Freedom of Information Act

  The Accounting Review · 2019-05-01 · 32 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  ABSTRACT A number of sell-side healthcare analysts gain access to information outside the purview of management through Freedom of Information Act requests to the Food and Drug Administration for records on factory inspections, complaints, and drug and medical device applications. Using a difference-in-differences methodology, we find that buy (sell) recommendations and upgrades (downgrades) earn higher (lower) stock returns over the year following the receipt of FDA records. We also examine the type of information revealed in FDA factory inspection reports, and find that analysts are less likely to downgrade and are less pessimistic in their recommendations than the consensus recommendation when the information contained in the FDA report is not particularly severe. Our findings are consistent with a subset of analysts utilizing non-public information channels independent of management to gain value-relevant information about their covered firms.

  PublisherDOI

• Did the 1999 NYSE and NASDAQ Listing Standard Changes on Audit Committee Composition Benefit Investors

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2017-01-12

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  In December 1999, the SEC instituted a new listing standard for NYSE and NASDAQ firms. Listed firms were now required to maintain fully independent audit committees with at least three members. In July 2002, the U.S. Congress legislated these standards through the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Our research question is whether all investors benefited from the 1999 new rule. Using both an event study and a difference-in-differences methodology, we find no evidence of higher market value or better financial reporting quality resulting from this rule.

  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• Emanuel Zur

  13 shared

• James Rosenfeld

  7 shared

• Yanting Shi

  7 shared

• Mary Brooke Billings

  New York University

  5 shared

• Raffaele Manini

  4 shared

• Seil Kim

  Baruch College

  4 shared

• Jeffrey L. Callen

  University of Toronto

  4 shared

• Lee‐Seok Hwang

  4 shared

Awards & honors

• Research Member of the European Corporate Governance Institu…
• WBS Distinguished Research Environment Professor at Warwick…