This paper aims to examine whether property rights protection can enhance firm innovation. To address the endogeneity problem and establish a causal relationship, we adopt the establishment of Intellectual Property Tribunals (IP Tribunals) in China as a natural experiment and employ the...

Since 1978, the effects of China's state-owned enterprise reform have received extensive attention, but the causal relationship between reform measures and profitability has rarely been verified. This study investigates the impact of China's ongoing mixed-ownership reform on state-owned...

We consider a class of learning problems in which an agent liquidates a risky asset while creating both transient price impact driven by an unknown convolution propagator and linear temporary price impact with an unknown parameter. We characterize the trader's performance as maximization of a...

We study finite-time horizon continuous-time linear-quadratic reinforcement learning problems in an episodic setting, where both the state and control coefficients are unknown to the controller. We first propose a least-squares algorithm based on continuous-time observations and controls, and...

The corporate charter is a contract between the firm and the state. Prior literature on contracts suggests three primary motives for contracting: risk shifting, incentive alignment, and transaction cost minimization. We argue that the characteristics of the industry within which a firm operates...

Standard deviations of the volatility premium, of implied volatility innovations, and of the volatility term structure spread in equity options help explain the cross-section of one-month-ahead underlying stock returns. The explanatory power from standard deviations is robust to the levels of...

How should executives discount commercial real estate cash flows up to 30 years in the future? In this paper, we develop a novel methodology to estimate the term structure of discount rates for commercial real estate cash flows. We find that the average term structure is downward sloping: longer...

How does a public electric utility company optimize its capital budget for grid reliability? We illustrate an economically optimal way to allocate funding these efforts using circuit-level data from Eversource Energy to quantify the benefits to tree trimming treatments over the period of...

We evaluate the importance of nonlinear interactions in volatility forecasting by comparing the predictive power of decision tree ensemble models relative to classical ones for normalized at-the-money implied volatility innovations. We measure the economic significance of these predictions in...