Many retail investment platforms have introduced artificial intelligence (AI) analysts to help individual investors gather insights and evaluate investment products. Yet, there is scant empirical effort examining the business impact of such an AI tool on individual investors' financial market...

By exploiting the local randomness in close-call labor elections, this paper finds a positive impact of labor unionization on firms’ real earnings management, suggesting the pressure effect of increased labor power. In a local regression discontinuity (RD) analysis, firms that narrowly pass...

We test for the causal impact of analyst coverage on corporate risk-taking in the property and casualty insurance sector, using the exogenous change in analyst coverage introduced by broker closures and mergers. We find that a decrease in analyst coverage promotes an increase in insurers’...

Using the passage of the Federal Trademark Dilution Act (FTDA) as an exogenous shock to trademark protection, we find that stronger trademark protection induces firms to increase their CEO risk-taking incentives as measured by CEO portfolio vega. The effect is greater for firms facing more...

We study the magnitude and nature of racial disparities in the U.S. small business credit market. Exploiting a unique dataset containing rich loan contract information, including firm and lender characteristics, we document sizable racial differentials in small business lending, measured by loan...

This paper investigates how fintech advancement influences marketing strategies like corporate advertising expenditures. We find that fintech development significantly promotes corporate advertising by mitigating the negative impact of financial constraints. We also find that the effect is more...

This study examines how minimum wage hikes affect firms’ industrial pollution. Using the establishment-level pollutant emission data on Chinese industrial firms and exploring the minimum wage policy discontinuities at county borders, we find that minimum wage hikes induce firms to pollute more...

This paper documents a negative effect of institutional cross-blockholding on portfolio firms’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance. Our baseline results show that cross-held firms perform worse in CSR than non-cross-held firms do. A quasi-natural experiment based on mergers...