A textual analysis of corporate‐social responsibility (CSR) reports reveals that companies engaged in environmental violations report differently from firms with a clean record. The violators issue longer, more positive and more frequent reports to relay environmental content that is more copious but less readable. The violator firms appear to modify their reporting practices right after committing a violation. The findings suggest that culpable firms exploit the current unregulated–unaudited state of CSR reporting as a means of greenwashing and call for institutional change. Our results are robust to a number of industry‐firm characteristics, including board composition, ownership dispersion and international presence.

Using data from the Athens Stock Exchange, we investigate early warning signs of delisting risk. We find that the probability of delisting and time to delist are positively associated with relative offer size and earnings’ manipulation, and negatively associated with hot-issuance periods and the joint effects of audit quality, amount of information in the I.P.O. prospectus, and the percentage of non-voluntary information. Our results are more strongly in line with asymmetric information explanations and more prevalent for voluntary delisted firms. Documenting I.P.O. survival factors for a new and different class of stocks extends the range of explanations for delisting risk.

While the water transportation industry is perceived as risk-laden, expected return estimates for shipping firms, based on the capital asset pricing model (CAPM), are found to be ‘remarkably low.’ We apply the implied cost of capital (ICC), defined as the constant discount rate that equates share prices and future cash flows, as an alternative means of shipping expected returns and use these estimates instead, as well as in conjunction with the CAPM to provide fresh evidence on the risk and return characteristics of the shipping industry. An aggregate measure of ICC reveals that the median risk premium of shipping firms between 1983 and 2013 is in the range of 0.94% to 0.08%. The expected return of shipping firms tracks a long-term moving average of the S&P 500 index; nevertheless, shipping returns are below the index return at similar, and at times lower, levels with the 10-year treasury yield. The expected equity premium of the shipping industry implied in the cross-section of ICC estimates and CAPM betas ranges between 1.4% and 0.2%. The persistence of a ‘shipping return paradox’ against a variant of expected return methodologies may indicate the pricing of higher moments in the return distribution of shipping firms beyond the mean-variance framework.