We study the consequences of a firm engaging in corporate social responsibility within the firm's operations, rather than doing so outside the firm through charitable donations. After April 2018 protests, Starbucks enacted policies that anybody could sit in their stores and use the bathroom...

Since 1977, U.S. states have passed laws steadily raising the age for which a child must ride in a car safety seat. These laws significantly raise the cost of having a third child, as many regular-sized cars cannot fit three child seats in the back. Using census data and state-year variation in...

We infer Moody's preference for accurate versus biased ratings using hand-collected data on the internal labor market outcomes of its analysts. We find that accurate analysts are more likely to be promoted and less likely to depart. The opposite is true for analysts who downgrade more...

I develop a simple competitive equilibrium model and derive the prediction that CEO pay-size elasticity increases when more firms compete for an inelastic supply of managers. Using industry-level IPO waves as a proxy for increased competition for CEOs, I find that pay-size elasticity increases...

This paper studies the long-term effects of redlining policies that restricted access to credit in urban communities. For empirical identification, we use a regression discontinuity design that exploits boundaries from maps created by the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) in 1940. We find that...

This paper proposes several frameworks to estimate the appropriate default correlations for structured products, each of which jointly considers the role of co-movements in modeled risk characteristics and un-modeled systematic risk, or 'frailty'. We contrast our estimates with credit rating...

This paper studies the effects of financial distress on workers' productivity. We use detailed data from the public school system in Texas, which allow us to exploit within-teacher variation and to control for a student's economic environment. We show that student performance decreases by 6.5%...

This paper studies the role of workplace peers in the transmission of information pertinent to an important household financial decision: the mortgage refinancing choice. Exploiting commonalities in teaching schedules of school teachers in Texas to identify peer groups, we find that refinancing...

This paper shows that the introduction of the "gig-economy" changes the way employees respond to job loss. Using administrative data on unemployment insurance (UI) claims matched with the credit profiles of individuals in the U.S., we show that laid-off employees with access to Uber are less...

We examine whether “rating shopping” or “rating catering” is a more accurate characterization of rating agency interactions regarding collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) prior to the credit crisis. Although investors paid a premium for dual-ratings, AAA CDO tranches rated by both...