We develop a method that identifies the attention paid by earnings call participants to firms' climate change exposures. The method adapts a machine learning keyword discovery algorithm and captures exposures related to opportunity, physical, and regulatory shocks associated with climate change....

Little attention has been given to the role of leadership characteristics in the organization design literature despite significant evidence of its importance in explaining firm behavior. This study develops and tests a model to assess the effects of leadership style on three control choices...

Using tools described in our earlier work (Hassan et al., 2019, 2020), we develop text-based measures of the costs, benefits, and risks listed firms in the US and over 80 other countries associate with the spread of Covid-19 and other epidemic diseases. We identify which firms expect to gain or...

We adapt simple tools from computational linguistics to construct a new measure of political risk faced by individual US firms: the share of their quarterly earnings conference calls that they devote to political risks. We validate our measure by showing it correctly identifies calls containing...

We study theoretically and empirically the relation between altruism preferences and incentive contract design. Theoretically, we extend Fischer and Huddart (2008) to investigate how social norms reinforce altruism preferences, thus affecting the optimal contract design related to incentive...

Using tools from computational linguistics, we construct new measures of the impact of Brexit on listed firms in the United States and around the world; these measures are based on the proportion of discussions in quarterly earnings conference calls on the costs, benefits, and risks associated...

Many decisions are made based on persuasion. In the persuasion process, self-interested agents produce information to convince an evaluator to approve their proposals. Whether an evaluator will discount the agents' suggestions and reject their proposal is neither clear nor obvious. We highlight...

This study examines if geographical variation in the dominant religion of a firm's location is associated with its ownership structures. We contrast two Christian faiths, Protestantism and Catholicism, which—despite theological similarities—have been associated with contrasting preferences...

We examine the effect of firm-level political risk on debt markets. While prior research relies mainly on economy-wide proxies for political risk, Hassan et al. (2019) suggests that a substantial amount of political risk plays out at the firm-level. We use their measure to show that...

We introduce a method that identifies firm-level climate change exposure from conversations in the earnings conference calls of more than 10,000 firms from 34 countries between 2002 and 2019. The method adapts a machine learning keyword discovery algorithm and captures exposures related to...