We study the consequences of weakening shareholder primacy using Nevada Senate Bill 203 as a quasi-natural experiment. A difference-in-differences analysis shows that, instead of improving their governance in response to the Bill to reassure capital providers, affected firms experience a...

We study the distribution of political speech across U.S. firms. We develop a measure of political engagement based on firms' communications (earnings calls, regulatory filings, and social media), by training a large language model to identify statements that contain political opinions. Using...

The field of international trade has undergone significant theoretical and empirical advancements over the last twenty-five years. A key breakthrough has been the emergence of firm-level approaches to studying exporting, importing, and global value chains. The field has also experienced a...

Recent work documents declining business dynamism in the United States, with concerning implications for markups, innovation and productivity. Using import data for 146 countries over three decades we document a set of new stylized facts describing market dynamism world-wide. Market entry rates...

We experimentally test two seminal hypotheses on the impact of competition on firms' management upgrading. In a first experiment, we protect firms from labor market competition by reducing the risk that a freshly trained manager would be poached by a rival firm. We find that this protection does...

In contracting out, monitoring is an important policy tool to extract information on firm quality and incentivize quality provision. This paper examines a central quality inspection of nursing homes, a sector with significant welfare implications but widespread public concerns about its quality...

To increase a company's earnings, a project must generate enough income next year to pay for its own financing. Hence, a manager who wants to maximize her EPS (earnings per share) should only invest in accretive projects that have income yields above the firm's cheapest financing option. This is...

We use administrative corporate tax data from the IRS to study a particular form of tax avoidance for US multinational corporations (MNCs). This strategy relies on cost sharing agreements (CSAs), which govern joint R&D efforts conducted with foreign affiliates and allow US MNCs to shift profits...

We use a novel dataset of production costs, wholesale prices, and retail prices from a large global manufacturer to study markups and pricing behavior along the supply chain. We document several facts about markups covering the period July 2018 through June 2023, and we propose a model of supply...

Firm location decisions are a key managerial choice, usually optimized over factors like proximity to customers or suppliers. These decisions may also impose externalities on the environment, and on other firms due to competitive or agglomerative forces. The inherent endogeneity of location...