This study finds that economic policy uncertainty (EPU) has different impacts on different categories of corporate environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance. EPU increases corporate governance quality, suggesting that good governance may serve as a hedge against adverse shocks....

This paper analyses the effect of mandatory pollution abatement on U.S. corporate investment and performance and shows that environmental regulation can stimulate investment in innovation. The following set of theoretical and empirical results are presented. For financially unconstrained firms,...

A growing number of corporations and politicians have acknowledged the importance of corporate social responsibility (CSR). Recent legislation proposes that corporations may become more stakeholder-focused if employees are given more power. We examine the impact of employee labor unions on...

We argue that political connections help financially constrained firms access external financing and consequently reduce their incentives to use tax planning as a source of internal financing. Consistent with this argument, we find that after a plausibly exogenous increase in political...

We examine whether the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) uniformly enforces the Clean Air Act for politically connected and unconnected firms using a close election setting. We find no difference in regulated pollutant emissions or EPA investigations between the two groups, though connected...

We use a new international setting to test and strengthen the identification of “target leverage hypothesis” in the payout policy literature. We conduct a quasi-natural experiment induced by staggered share repurchase legalization in 17 economies and analyze its influences on leverage...