This paper examines the large, steady, and continuing growth of the Big Three index fund managers--BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street Global Advisors. We show that there is a real prospect that index funds will continue to grow, and that voting in most significant public companies will come...

Using the complete history of regular quarterly and annual filings by U.S. corporations from 1995-2014, we show that when firms make an active change in their reporting practices, this conveys an important signal about future firm operations. Changes to the language and construction of financial...

This paper examines executive turnover -- both for management and supervisory boards - - and its relation to firm performance in the largest companies in Germany in the 1980s. The management board turns over slowly -- at a rate of 10% per year -- implying that top executives in Germany have...

We examine the current state of the U.S. public corporation and how it has evolved over the last 40 years. After falling by 50 percent since its peak in 1997, the number of public corporations is now smaller than 40 years ago. These corporations are now much larger and over the last twenty years...

From 1963 through 2015, idiosyncratic risk (IR) is high when market risk (MR) is high. We show that the positive relation between IR and MR is highly stable through time and is robust across exchanges, firm size, liquidity, and market-to-book groupings. Though stock liquidity affects the...

We examine how exposure of Chinese firms to the Covid-19 shock varied with a cluster index (measuring spatial agglomeration of firms in related industries) at the county level. Two data sources are used: entry flows of newly registered firms in the entire country, and an entrepreneur survey...

We assess the Covid-19 pandemic's implications for state government sales and income tax revenues. We estimate that the economic declines implied by recent forecasts from the Congressional Budget Office will lead to a shortfall of roughly $106 billion in states' sales and income tax revenues for...