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...

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,...

Beginning in November 2000, patent applications filed in the United States are disclosed after 18 months, rather than when the patent is granted. Using U.S. patent data from 1976-1996, we find that major inventions are most likely to be affected, as they take longer to go through the application...

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...

A concern central to the economics of privacy is that firms may use consumer data to price discriminate. A common response is that consumers should have control over their data and the ability to choose how firms access it. Since firms draw inferences based on both the data seen as well as the...

In many industries firms can learn about new technologies from other adopters; mandatory disclosure regulations represent an understudied channel for this type of social learning. We study an environmentally-focused law in the shale gas industry to examine firms' claims that disclosure...

This paper analyzes how corporate disclosure has been reshaped by machine processors, employed by algorithmic traders, robot investment advisors, and quantitative analysts. Our findings indicate that increasing machine and AI readership, proxied by machine downloads, motivates firms to prepare...

This paper develops and tests a model in which 1) purpose-driven firms emerge as an optimal organizational form even for profit-maximizing entrepreneurs; and 2) CSR arises endogenously as a response to imperfect regulatory oversight. Purpose-driven organizations allow entrepreneurs to create...

Initial coin offerings (ICOs) are sales of blockchain-based digital tokens associated with specific platforms or assets. Since 2014 ICOs have emerged as a new financing instrument, with some parallels to IPOs, venture capital, and pre-sale crowdfunding. We examine the relationship between issuer...

Disclosure policies have the potential to help consumers and make markets more efficient. Yet, the effectiveness of disclosure policies can be undermined if firms strategically make unfavorable information unnecessarily complicated to understand. To explore the incentives for using complexity in...