The rise of shale gas and tight oil development has triggered a major debate about hydraulic fracturing (HF). In an effort to mitigate risks from HF, especially with respect to water quality, many U.S. states have introduced disclosure mandates for HF wells and fracturing fluids. We use this...

Investing according to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria is gaining momentum. Most environmental performance indices focus only on the tonnage of carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions. This paper proposes an index covering eight pollutants expressed in monetary damage. Inclusion of...

Using new data matching remittances and monthly payroll disbursals, we demonstrate how fluctuations in migrants' earnings in the United Arab Emirates affect their remittances. We consider three types of income fluctuations that are observable by families at home: seasonalities, weather shocks...

In 2011, a reform in the United Arab Emirates allowed any employer to renew a migrant's visa upon contract expiration without written permission from the initial employer. We find that the reform increased incumbent migrants' earnings and firm retention of these workers. This occurs despite an...

We estimate the individual returns to temporary migration programs using a randomized experiment with several thousand job seekers in India applying to guest worker jobs in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Working with construction companies and the UAE Ministry of Labor, we randomized job offers...

We examine how sell-side equity analysts strategically disclose information of differing quality to the public versus the buy-side mutual fund managers to whom they are connected. We consider cases in which analysts recommend that the public buys a stock, but some fund managers sell it. We...

We document that value-to-price, the ratio of Residual-Income-Model-based valuation to market price, subsumes the power of book-to-market ratio and many other value or quality measures in predicting stock returns. Long-short value-to-price portfolios hedge against momentum, revitalize the...

How much of the economy is focused on protecting, rehabilitating, or managing the environment? To answer this question, we develop a proof-of-concept environmental activity account to quantify the environmental goods and services sector (EGSS) in the United States. Methodologically, we employ a...

Financial reports present assets, liabilities, and earnings on a nominal basis (unadjusted for inflation). Using a novel dataset of nearly a century of financial reports, this paper examines whether and how inflation affects the relation between accounting earnings and stock market value, i.e.,...

We examine whether the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 increased the information content of corporate earnings disclosures. Prior research questions whether the Act improved disclosure quality but generally relies on long-window tests and yields mixed results. We focus on whether the Act...