In 2021, many firms began considering and implementing vaccine mandates as a means to return workers to in-person work. In response, twelve states enacted laws banning employer COVID-19 vaccine mandates. We study equity market reactions to these bans and find a 0.64 percentage point increase in...

This study uses passage of the Dodd-Frank Act as a setting to examine whether changes in legal liability exposure faced by credit rating agencies affect the number of financial statement information signals required before rating changes. For upgrades, we predict and find that the greater legal...

This study provides some of the first evidence on gender-based differences in director retention at US public firms. While men hold the bulk of directorships, female directors are less likely than male directors to depart a board in a given year. However, when boards face adversity by way of...

Leasing's impact on leverage remains an open debate in the literature. Some argue that leasing and secured debt are substitutes, while others argue that leasing can preserve secured debt capacity and facilitate greater borrowing. I exploit a Moody's accounting policy change that unexpectedly...

This paper examines the dispersion in cybersecurity risk across firms. Using new, proprietary data on the Fortune 500 firms, We show that higher productivity firms exhibit abnormal returns. We subsequently document three new facts: (a) higher productivity firms have fewer cybersecurity...

Why do firms offer non-wage compensation instead of the equivalent amount in financial compensation? We argue that firms use non-wage benefits, specifically maternity leave, to efficiently target workers with desirable characteristics. Using Glassdoor data, we show that firms offer higher...

Exploiting exogenous variation introduced by a significant change in S&P's methodology, we show that credit ratings have a first-order causal impact on capital structure and investment decisions. Quantifying debt capacity within a firm's credit rating (Ratings Capacity) using precise metrics, we...