Even when — objectively speaking — death is on the line, partisan bias still colors beliefs about facts. We use data on internet searches as well as proprietary data on county-level average daily travel distance and visits to non-essential businesses from a large sample of U.S. smartphones...

We examine the relationship between public firm disclosure and aggregate new business formation. Consistent with the notion that public company disclosures provide information spillovers that reduce the extent of uncertainty about new investment opportunities, we find that increased public firm...

The introduction of the gig economy creates opportunities for would-be entrepreneurs to supplement their income in downside states of the world, and provides insurance in the form of an income fallback in the event of failure. We present a conceptual framework supporting the notion that the gig...

We examine whether similarities in legal, sociological, and cultural characteristics between countries (country-pair homophily) affect foreign director appointments. Our results from estimating a gravity model, which includes economic and geographic country characteristics, indicate that...

Despite the human capital in corporate tax departments representing the average firm's most direct and substantial investment in tax compliance and planning, our understanding of it is limited. Using employee movement between the tax departments of publicly-traded U.S. corporations, we shed...

When hiring new workers, employers often screen large numbers of written applications before selecting a subset for more costly, in-person interviews. A large literature suggests that information frictions lead to screening on imperfect quality signals - e.g., educational pedigree and...

We examine the extent to which the labor market facilitates the diffusion of tax planning knowledge across firms. Using a novel dataset of tax department employee movements between S&P 1500 firms, we find that firms experience an increase in their tax planning after hiring a tax employee from a...

Antitrust authorities search public documents to discover anticompetitive mergers. Thus, investor disclosures may alert them to deals that would otherwise escape scrutiny, creating disincentives for managers to divulge transactions. We study this behavior in publicly traded US companies. First,...