Private equity critics claim that leveraged buyouts bring huge job losses. To investigate this claim, we construct and analyze a new dataset that covers U.S. private equity transactions from 1980 to 2005. We track 3,200 target firms and their 150,000 establishments before and after acquisition,...

In the U.S., manufacturing plants grow or die. In contrast, surviving Indian plants exhibit little growth in terms of either employment or output. Indian plants start smaller and stay smaller. Most Indian manufacturing employment is at informal plants with fewer than 10 workers. In the U.S. most...

We show that the stock market downturns of 2000-2002 and 2007-2009 have very different proximate causes. The early 2000's saw a large increase in the discount rates applied to profits by rational investors, while the late 2000's saw a decrease in rational expectations of future profits. We reach...

We examine how executives' behavior outside the workplace, as measured by their ownership of luxury goods (low “frugality”) and prior legal infractions, is related to financial reporting risk. We predict and find that CEOs and CFOs with a legal record are more likely to perpetrate fraud. In...

We study which dimensions of corporate culture are related to a firm's performance and why. We find that proclaimed values appear irrelevant. Yet, when employees perceive top managers as trustworthy and ethical, firm's performance is stronger. We then study how different governance structures...

We examine hedge fund risk management practices and their association with left-tail risk during the 2008 financial crisis. Consistent with risk management practices reducing left-tail risk, funds in our sample that use formal risk models performed significantly better in the extreme down months...

Using a hand-collected sample of election nominations for more than 30,000 directors over the period 2001–2010, we construct a novel measure of director proximity to elections called Years-to-election. We find that the closer directors of a board are to their next elections, the higher CEO...

Large-scale increases in discrimination can lead to dismissals of highly qualified managers. We investigate how expulsions of senior Jewish managers, due to rising discrimination in Nazi Germany, affected large corporations. Firms that lost Jewish managers experienced persistent reductions in...

The effects of large banks on the real economy are theoretically ambiguous and politically controversial. I identify quasi-exogenous increases in bank size in postwar Germany. I show that firms did not grow faster after their relationship banks became bigger. In fact, opaque borrowers grew more...

This paper uses ChatGPT, a large language model, to extract managerial expectations of corporate policies from disclosures. We create a firm-level ChatGPT investment score, based on conference call texts, that measures managers’ anticipated changes in capital expenditures. We validate the...