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...

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...

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...

We examine the effect of a representative pension reform on the retention and productivity of workers. The reform cut pension annuities and early retirement benefits for public school teachers, projected to save eight percent of pension revenues. We leverage administrative records and a...

We study the macroeconomic implications of asymmetric information in capital markets. We build a quantitative capital-accumulation model in which capital is traded in illiquid markets, with sellers having more information about capital quality than buyers. Asymmetric information distorts the...

This is a paper in the ``economists ruin everything'' field. It considers whether Catch-22 situations can persist as an equilibrium phenomenon. Rather than being an arbitrary rule or a set of self-serving beliefs, the focus is on the preferences of Gatekeepers who choose to create such...

Liquidity management is key in industries with variable cash flows. We study how businesses in the highway construction industry manage cash flow by strategically bidding more on work with an earlier payout--a practice known as front-end loading. We find that small contractors, infrequent...

This paper examines how the introduction of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly generative and large language models capable of interpolating precisely between known data points, reshapes scientists' incentives for pursuing novel versus incremental research. Extending the theoretical...

We analyze the offering, asking, and granting of help or other benefits as a three-stage game with bilateral private information between a person in need of help and a potential help-giver. Asking entails the risk of rejection, which can be painful: since unawareness of the need can no longer be...

We examine the optimal financing of infrastructure when governments have limited financial commitment and can expropriate rents from private sector firms that manage infrastructure. While private firms need incentives to implement projects well, governments need incentives to limit...