In 2003, a new law required that 40 percent of Norwegian firms' directors be women ndash; at the time only nine percent of directors were women. We use the pre-quota cross-sectional variation in female board representation to instrument for exogenous changes to corporate boards following the...

Compared to the federal government, the average citizen in the U.S. has far greater interaction with city governments, including policing, health services, zoning laws, utilities, schooling, and transportation. At the regional level, it is city governments that provide the infrastructure and...

Terrorist attacks influence economic growth and individual psychology. However, identifying the direct effect of terrorism on economics and psychology is difficult because institutions also change in response to terrorist attacks. This paper controls for institutional responses to terrorist...

This paper exploits hand-collected data on illegal insider trades to test whether standard illiquidity measures can detect informed trading. Controlling for unobserved cross-sectional and time-series variation, sampling bias, and strategic timing of insider trades, I find that only absolute...

M&As should be defined to include joint ventures, alliances, and divestitures in addition to mergers and acquisitions. M&As represent a neoclassical theory of how firms seek to enhance their capabilities and resources (the good). Good M&As are positive net present value external investments....

Industries that are more central in the network of intersectoral trade earn higher stock returns than industries that are less central. To explain this finding, I argue that stocks in more central industries have greater market risk because they have greater exposure to sectoral shocks that...

Firms have an incentive to manage media coverage to influence their stock price during important corporate events. Using comprehensive data on media coverage and merger negotiations, we find that bidders in stock mergers originate substantially more news stories after the start of merger...

Terrorist attacks influence economic growth and individual psychology. However, identifying the direct effect of terrorism on economics and psychology is difficult because institutions also change in response to terrorist attacks. This paper controls for institutional responses to terrorist...