Insiders can artificially deflect the market prices of financial instruments from their full-information or inside value' by issuing deceptive accounting reports. Incentive support for disinformational activity comes through forms of compensation that allow corporate insiders to profit...

We study financial reporting and corporate governance in 218 companies accused of price fixing. These firms engage in evasive financial reporting strategies, including earnings smoothing, segment reclassification, and restatements. In corporate governance, cartel firms favor outside directors...

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...

Using natural language processing, we identify corporate goals stated in the shareholder letters of the 150 largest companies in the United States from 1955 to 2020. Corporate goals have proliferated, from less than one on average in 1955 to more than 7 in 2020. While in 1955, profit...

We quantify the U.S. corporate sector's carbon externality by computing the sector's "carbon burden"--the present value of social costs of its future carbon emissions. Our baseline estimate of the carbon burden is 131% of total corporate equity value. Among individual firms, 77% have carbon...

We investigate compensation policies in family and non-family firms using a novel employer-employee matched dataset comprising nearly the universe of Italian incorporated firms and ownership information. Family firms pay significantly lower wages and offer slower and less rewarding careers....

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...

China's industrial policies ("Five-Year Plans") displace U.S. production/employment and heighten plant closures in the same industries as those targeted by the policies in China. The impact was not anticipated by the stock market, but U.S. companies in the "treated industries" suffer a valuation...

We find widespread evidence of firms appearing to avoid paying overtime wages by exploiting a federal law that allows them to do so for employees termed as "managers" and paid a salary above a pre-defined dollar threshold. We show that listings for salaried positions with managerial titles...

Using limitations to the deductibility of interest payments triggered by the introduction of interest ceiling rules globally, we show that affected private firms reduce leverage relative to unaffected firms. In support of a causal effect of taxes on corporate capital structure choices, we show...