We examine the rise of cloud computing and AI in China and their impacts on industry dynamics after the shock to the cost of Internet-based computing power and services. We find that cloud computing is associated with an increase in firm entry, exit and the likelihood of M&A in industries that...

Executive teams in U.S. firms are becoming increasingly partisan. We establish this new fact using political affiliations from voter registration records for top executives of S&P 1500 firms between 2008 and 2020. The new fact is explained by both an increasing share of Republican executives and...

Most research on the CEO labor market studies public company CEOs while largely ignoring CEOs in private equity (PE) funded companies. We fill this gap by studying the market for CEOs among U.S. companies purchased by PE firms in large leveraged buyout transactions. 71% of those companies hired...

Using more than 4,900 assessments, we study changes in the characteristics and objectives of CEOs and top executives since 2001. The same four factors explain roughly half of the variation of assessed CEO characteristics in this larger sample of executive assessments as in Kaplan and Sorensen...

Using textual analysis of earnings conference calls, we quantify firms' supply chain risk and its sources. Our proxy for supply chain risk exhibits large cross-sectional and time-series variation that aligns with reasonable priors and is unprecedently high during the Covid-19 pandemic. In...

One of the most consequential events in any firm's lifetime is a major acquisition. Because of their importance, mergers and acquisitions (M&As) have been an enormous area of research. However, the vast majority of this research and survey papers summarizing this research have focused on...

We examine the impact of lost intellectual property protection on innovation, competition, acquisitions, lawsuits and employment agreements. We consider firms whose ability to protect intellectual property (IP) using patents is weakened following the Alice Corp. vs. CLS Bank International...

This paper connects changes in employer characteristics through job transitions to employee earnings following mergers and acquisitions (M&As). Using firm balance sheet data linked to individual earnings data in Canada and a matched difference-in-differences design, we find that after M&As...