We document that corporate directors' past experience with abnormally severe climatic natural disasters shape their prosocial preferences and influence firm climate policies. Using detailed data on director career histories and county-level natural disasters, we identify Directors with Abnormal...

Using a randomized control trial, this paper studies an at-scale preschool construction program that serves poor communities in rural Mozambique. We show that the program significantly increased preschool enrollment in treated communities by 73 percentage points, from a small base of 2 percent...

Infrastructure assets have undergone substantial privatization in recent decades. How do different types of owners target and manage these assets? And does the contract form--control rights (concession) vs. outright ownership (sale)--matter? We explore these questions in the context of global...

Information technology (IT) can enhance firms' long-run performance but is also a risky investment, with high fixed costs and uncertain returns. Whether market events influence this tradeoff has received limited attention. We leverage the healthcare context to empirically examine hospitals' IT...

We survey a representative sample of the U.S. population to understand stakeholders' desire to see their firms exit Russia after the invasion of Ukraine. 61% of respondents think that firms should exit Russia, regardless of the consequences. Only 37% think that leaving Russia is a purely...

We present a mechanism based on managerial incentives through which common ownership affects product market outcomes. Firm-level variation in common ownership causes variation in managerial incentives and productivity across firms, which leads to intra-industry and intra-firm cross-market...

Using natural language processing, we identify corporate goals stated in the shareholder letters of the 150 largest companies in the United States from 1955 to 2020. Corporate goals have proliferated, from less than one on average in 1955 to more than 7 in 2020. While in 1955, profit...

We examine merging firms' additions and removals of products for a sample of 66 mergers across a wide variety of consumer packaged goods markets. We find that mergers lead to a net reduction in the number of products offered by merging firms. Merging firms tend to both drop and add products at...

We estimate the effects of privatization on zombie versus healthy state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in China, extending our analysis beyond TFP to a broad array of financial and economic indicators. Privatizing zombie SOEs enhances labor productivity and TFP, reduces bank and government subsidies,...

This paper models the adoption by established firms of technologies that are internally disruptive in that different parts of an organization stand to lose or gain from adoption. When agents disagree with a decision they impose costs on the firm. The paper shows that any resistance to change...