We investigate how debt financing responds to exposure to long-lived and temporary cash flow shocks. We identify these shocks using filtering methods that we demonstrate are highly effective for corporate finance data using Monte-Carlo simulations. The long-lived and temporary shocks we identify...

We show that technology spillovers shift the composition of corporate research and development (R&D) by promoting innovation based on the exploitation of existing knowledge, while disincentivizing innovation that explores new areas and breaks new ground. Accordingly, firms facing large...

Using news articles covering firm's corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities, we find that publicized CSR activities are positively associated with shareholder value and improved future operating performance. Furthermore, we find that media coverage on CSR engagements with local impact...

This paper examines the optimal incentive scheme in motivating people to innovate under ambiguity. When an innovation's prospects are ambiguous, the use of extrinsic, high-powered incentives can lead the agent's beliefs about the project's outcome to deviate from that of the principal's, which...

We study the effect of corporate cultural similarity on merger decisions and outcomes. Using the similarity in firms' corporate social responsibility characteristics to proxy for cultural similarity, we find that culturally similar firms are more likely to merge. Moreover, these mergers are...

We show that the similarity of a firm's technological expertise with other firms affects outcomes in the managerial labor market. Using each firm's patent portfolio to estimate its technological expertise, we find that its similarity in technological expertise with other firms is strongly...

Using a difference-in-differences (DiD) setting that leverages the staggered adoption of R&D tax credits across the U.S. states, we show that after a firm receives the tax credits, products of its peers become significantly more similar to the recipient firm. Such product convergence is...

The empirical pricing kernels estimated from index options are non-monotone (Rosenberg and Engle, 2002; Bakshi, Madan, and Panayotov, 2010) and the corresponding risk aversion functions can be negative (Ait-Sahalia and Lo, 2000; and Jackwerth, 2000). We show theoretically that these and several other...

Actively managed mutual funds have distinct return distributions from their passive benchmarks and our theoretical analysis using tail-sensitive risk preferences suggests that active value and growth funds may serve to reduce downside risk and capture upside potential, respectively. Furthermore,...