Public attention to a firm may provide valuable monitoring, but it may also have a dark side by constraining management's decisions and distracting it. We use inclusion in the S&P 500 index as a positive shock to public attention. Media coverage, Google searches, SEC downloads, SEC comment...

We analyze the short and long-run performance of firms that were differentially affected by a new tax on dividends in the lead-up to the Global Financial Crisis. We use exogenous policy variation for firms with different legal statuses and financial year-end dates to causally identify the policy...

We create a firm-level ChatGPT investment score, based on conference calls, that measures managers' anticipated changes in capital expenditures. We validate the score with interpretable textual content and its strong correlation with CFO survey responses. The investment score predicts future...

Firms have inefficiently low incentives to innovate when other firms benefit from their inventions and the innovating firm therefore does not capture the full surplus of its innovations. We show that common ownership of firms mitigates this impediment to corporate innovation. By contrast,...

Our calculations indicate that currently proposed U.S. policies to reduce pharmaceutical prices, though particularly beneficial for low-income and elderly populations, could dramatically reduce firms' investment in highly welfare-improving R&D. The U.S. subsidizes the worldwide pharmaceutical...

Manufacturers of durable goods can encourage consumers facing transaction costs to upgrade by accepting used units as trade-ins. These "buyback schemes" increase demand for new units, but increase the supply of used units if trade-ins are resold. In this paper, I investigate the equilibrium...

Abstract U.S. firms have reduced their investment in scientific research ("R") compared to product development ("D"), raising questions about the returns to each type of investment, and about the reasons for this shift. We use Census data that disaggregates "R" from "D" to study how US firms...

This paper robustly concludes that it cannot. A model is constructed under idealised conditions that presume the risks associated with artificial general intelligence (AGI) are real, that safe AGI products are possible, and that there exist socially-minded funders who are interested in funding...

We study changes in markups across 72 product markets from 2006 to 2018. A growing literature has documented a rise in markups over time using a production function approach; we instead employ the standard microeconomic method, which is to estimate demand and then invert firms' first-order...

With the rise of social media and streaming platforms, firms and brand-owners increasingly depend on influencers to attract consumers, who care about both common product quality and consumer-influencer interaction. Sellers thus compete in both influencer and product markets. As outreach and...