Investing according to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria is gaining momentum. Most environmental performance indices focus only on the tonnage of carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions. This paper proposes an index covering eight pollutants expressed in monetary damage. Inclusion of...

Can managers influence the liquidity of their firms' shares? We use plausibly exogenous variation in the supply of public information to show that firms seek to actively shape their information environments by voluntarily disclosing more information than is mandated by market regulations and...

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 examine whether the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 increased the information content of corporate earnings disclosures. Prior research questions whether the Act improved disclosure quality but generally relies on long-window tests and yields mixed results. We focus on whether the Act...

We examine the real effects of the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program (GHGRP) on electric power plants in the United States. Starting in 2010, the GHGRP requires both the reporting of greenhouse gas emissions by facilities emitting more than 25,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year to the...

The 1964 Securities Acts Amendments extended the mandatory disclosure requirements that had applied to listed firms since 1934 to large firms traded Over-the-Counter (OTC). We find several pieces of evidence indicating that investors valued these disclosure requirements, two of which are...

DuPont, one of the most respectable U.S. companies, caused environmental damage that ended up costing the company around a billion dollars. By using internal company documents disclosed in trials we rule out the possibilities that this bad outcome was due to ignorance, an unexpected realization,...

The rise of shale gas and tight oil development has triggered a major debate about hydraulic fracturing (HF). In an effort to mitigate risks from HF, especially with respect to water quality, many U.S. states have introduced disclosure mandates for HF wells and fracturing fluids. We use this...

Using an index which increases as a firm adopts more governance attributes, we find that 12.7% of foreign firms have a higher index than matching U.S. firms. The best predictor for whether a foreign firm adopts more governance attributes than a comparable U.S. firm is whether the firm comes from...

Disclosure--the practice of providing information to support decision making--has been widely mandated in public policy but is routinely ignored by consumers and subject to obfuscation by firms. Yet most evidence on the effectiveness of consumer financial disclosure stems from lab experiments...