Good data on the size and composition of the independent contractor workforce are elusive, with household survey and administrative tax data often disagreeing on levels and trends. We carried out a series of focus groups to learn how self-employed independent contractors speak about their work....

Career opportunities and expectations shape people's decisions and can diminish over time. In this paper, we study the career implications of automation and robotization using a novel data set of resumes from approximately 16 million individuals from the United States. We calculate the lifetime...

The US spends more than 4 trillion dollars per year on health care, largely conducted by private providers and reimbursed by insurers. A major concern in this system is overbilling, waste and fraud by providers, who face incentives to misreport on their claims in order to receive higher...

Audits are a common mechanism used by governments to monitor public spending. In this paper, we discuss the effectiveness of auditing with theory and empirics. In our model, the value of audits depends on both the underlying presence of abuse and the government's ability to observe it and...

When organizations have limited accountability, antifraud measures, including auditing, often face barriers due to institutional resistance and practical difficulties on the ground. This is especially true in development aid, where aid organizations face incentives to suppress information about...

A classic problem in public finance is the over-expenditure of local governments in expectation of a bailout from higher-level administrations. While monitoring could mitigate agency problems, it can itself be rendered ineffective if auditors are corruptible. I evaluate whether limiting...

To understand the disruption and implications of distributed ledger technologies for financial reporting and auditing, we analyze firm misreporting, auditor monitoring and competition, and regulatory policy in a unified model. A federated blockchain for financial reporting and auditing can...

While U.S. legislation prohibits employers from sharing information about their employees' compensation with each other, companies are still allowed to acquire and use more aggregated data provided by third parties. Most medium and large firms report using this type of data to set salaries, a...

This paper investigates how shocks to expected cash flows influence CEO incentive compensation. Exploiting changes in compliance with environmental regulations as shocks to expected future cash flows, we find that adverse shocks typically prompt corporate boards to recalibrate CEO compensation...

Although corporate finance theory suggests how adverse shocks influence shareholder preferences toward corporate risk-taking and executive compensation, few researchers explore this relationship empirically. We construct a firm-year measure of unexpected shocks to environmental regulatory...