The impact of unconventional oil and gas development on water quality is a major environmental concern. We built a large geocoded database that combines surface water measurements with horizontally drilled wells stimulated by hydraulic fracturing (HF) for several shales to examine whether temporal and spatial well variation is associated with anomalous salt concentrations in United States watersheds. We analyzed four ions that could indicate water impact from unconventional development. We found very small concentration increases associated with new HF wells for barium, chloride, and strontium but not bromide. All ions showed larger, but still small-in-magnitude, increases 91 to 180 days after well spudding. Our estimates were most pronounced for wells with larger amounts of produced water, wells located over high-salinity formations, and wells closer and likely upstream from water monitors.
We exploit IFRS mandatory adoption as a source of variation in the demand for conditional conservatism to examine the role of unaffiliated bankers on the level of conditional conservatism. We show that firms with unaffiliated bankers on boards of directors experience a significant increase in the level of conditional conservatism compared with firms without unaffiliated bankers on boards. These findings hold after we account for other country‐level factors that shape the demand for conditional conservatism. Additional analyses show that the role of unaffiliated bankers on conditional conservatism depends also on firm‐specific incentives arising from the contracting environment. Taken together, our findings provide new insights into the role of corporate governance arrangements on financial reporting outcomes.
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