Are pandemics systemically important to modern-day financial markets? This study uses the COVID-19 pandemic as a natural experiment for testing how large-scale pandemics affect the financial markets. Using hand-collected data at the firm level, I find that managers systematically underestimated...

Theories of delegated monitoring predict that when public disclosure is costly, monitoring by a large investor leads management to supply more private information to that investor, and less public disclosure to other similarly aligned investors who free-ride off the monitor. We test this...

Recent research shows that weather events impact firms' operational and financial performance, raising the question of whether investors can diversify weather risk. We show that firms' exposure to weather is a systematic non-diversifiable risk, and that this risk is economically significant. We...