We examine the effect of the introduction of ridehailing in U.S. cities on fatal traffic accidents. The arrival of ridehailing is associated with an increase of approximately 3% in the number of fatalities and fatal accidents, for both vehicle occupants and pedestrians. The effects persist when...

The success of non-pharmaceutical interventions to contain pandemics often depends greatly upon voluntary compliance with government guidelines. What explains variation in voluntary compliance? Using mobile phone and survey data, we show that during the early phases of COVID-19, voluntary social...

Even when, objectively speaking, death is on the line, partisan bias still colors beliefs about facts. We show that a higher share of Trump voters in a county is associated with lower perceptions of risk during the COVID-19 pandemic. As Trump voter share rises, individuals search less for...

The introduction of the gig economy creates opportunities for would-be entrepreneurs to supplement their income in downside states of the world and provides insurance in the form of an income fallback in the event of failure. We present a conceptual framework supporting the notion that the gig...

Antitrust authorities search public documents to discover anticompetitive mergers. Thus, investor disclosures may alert them to deals that would otherwise escape scrutiny, creating disincentives for managers to divulge transactions. We study this behavior in publicly traded US companies. First,...

We evaluate the net benefits of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) for shareholders by studying the lobbying behavior of investors and corporate insiders to affect the final implemented rules under the Act. Investors lobbied overwhelmingly in favor of strict implementation of SOX, while corporate...

Recent studies suggest that the underperformance of IPOs in the post-1970 sample may be a small sample effect or %u201CPeso%u201D problem. That is, IPO underperformance may result from observing too few star performers ex-post than were expected ex-ante. We develop a model of IPO performance...

The use of debt to finance risky entrepreneurial-firm projects is rife with informational and contracting problems. Nonetheless, we document widespread lending to startups in three innovation-intensive sectors and in early stages of development. At odds with claims that the secondary patent...

Institutional investors of all types exhibit substantial home-state bias when investing in private equity (PE) funds. This effect is particularly pronounced for public pension funds, where the local overweighting amounts to 9.7% of the private equity portfolio on average, based on 5-year rolling...

We create a novel dataset to examine the nature and determinants of dual-class IPOs. We document that dual-class firms have different types of controlling shareholders and wedges between voting and economic rights. We find that the founders' wedge is largest when founders have stronger...