Humankind is confronted with a "nuclear stewardship curse'', facing the prospect of needing to manage nuclear products over long time scales in the face of the short-time scales of human polities. I propose a super Manhattan-type effort to rejuvenate the nuclear energy industry to overcome the...

We live in a ‘zero-risk society', characterized by a culture that is obsessed with controlling and removing any possible risks. Obviously, one of the fundamental objectives of any civilization is to improve the safety and security of its citizens. However, we should not let the cozy comfort...

Recent empirical studies show that innovative firms heavily rely on debt financing. Debt overhang implies that debt hampers investment by incumbents. We show that a second effect of debt is that it stimulates entry of new firms and, therefore, innovation. Using a Schumpeterian growth model in...

We analyze how the adoption of the California Consumer Protection Act (CCPA), which limits buying or selling consumer data, heterogeneously affects firms with and without previously gathered data on consumers. Exploiting a novel and hand-collected data set of 11,436 conversational-AI firms with...

We find that investors are fixated on analysts' consensus outputs (earnings forecasts, recommendations, and forecast dispersion), which can be inferior signals compared to the corresponding outputs provided by high-quality analysts, especially when a large number of high-quality analysts follow...

This paper studies the earnings management behavior of a manager in a strategic game in which the manager may have incentives to avoid earnings below the analysts' consensus forecast and the analysts aiming to provide accurate forecasts behave as rational Bayesians. Our analysis reveals the...

The current accounting and regulatory framework grants banks considerable discretion in the treatment of investment securities. We show that banks' use of this discretion increases the information asymmetry reflected in their equity prices. In addition, we find that this source of bank opacity...

We provide the first global estimates of profit shifting at the subsidiary-year level. Employing nonparametric estimation techniques within a mainstay model of profit shifting, we examine the subsidiary-year responses of earnings to the composite tax indicator faced by all subsidiaries of a...

Based on signaling theory, we examine the role of external reviews during the life-cycle of corporate green bonds. We focus on (1) whether investment greenness is related to external review upon issuing a green bond and (2) whether disclosure quality is positively associated with the assurance...

We develop a dynamic tradeoff model to examine the importance of manager-shareholder conflicts in capital structure choice. Using panel data on leverage choices and the model's predictions for different statistical moments of leverage, we show that while refinancing costs help explain the...