We draw on new data and theory to examine how private market contracts adapt to serve multiple goals, particularly the social-benefit goals that impact funds add to their financial goals. Counter to the intuition from multitasking models (Holmstrom and Milgrom, 1991), few impact funds tie...

A common argument against divestment is that it jettisons voting power and that it has a small effect on stock prices. We argue that divestment is a form of voice that changes social preferences. We show that the Go Fossil Free divestment movement has had a disproportionate impact on share...

This survey provides an overview of theoretical and empirical research on information flows in corporations. It highlights key frictions preventing effective information flows and discusses how organizational structure and corporate governance can alleviate these frictions, focusing on three...

Using a novel text-based measure of top management team diversity, covering over 70,000 top executives in over 6,500 U.S. firms from 1999 to 2014, we show that analyst forecasts are systematically more pessimistic for firms with more diverse top management teams ("diverse firms"), especially for...

Using the natural experiment created by France's 2011 board gender-quota law, we find that the presence of women on boards increases firms’ environmental and social (E&S) performance. Our results are robust to controlling for several directors’ observable characteristics and proxies for...

We find that similarity of political views between the CEO and independent directors (“political homophily”) encourages the CEO to share adverse information with the board. Firms with higher political homophily have lower stock price crash risk, and are more likely to divest previously...

This paper exploits newly available information on firms' direct (own production) and indirect (supplier-generated) carbon emission intensities and transaction-level imports to conduct an in-depth analysis of whether and how U.S. firms address climate change. We find robust evidence that U.S....

We propose a strategic theory of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). Shareholder maximizers commit to a mission statement that extends beyond firm value maximization. This commitment leads firms (either product market competitors or complementors along the value chain) to change their actions...

Utilizing the patterns in settlement of Scots-Irish in the United States, this study examines the effects of honor culture on corporate control contests. This culture is characterized by the importance of building a personal reputation and maintaining this reputation at all cost. We find that...

We develop a model in which there are firms and employees who care about profit-sacrificing higher purpose (HP) and those who do not. Firms and employees search for each other in the labor market. Each firm chooses its HP investment. When there is no social pressure on firms to adopt a purpose,...