This study investigates the effects of labor costs on firms' capital investments and stock returns. I estimate wage premia across U.S. industries and show that the negative investment-return relation implied by q-theory is steeper for firms paying high wage premia than for firms paying low wage...

If equity and corporate bond markets are integrated, risk premia in one market should appear in the other, and their magnitudes should be consistent with each other. We use this insight to examine market integration between equity and corporate bonds in the cross section. Some variables (e.g.,...

Financial analysts may have strategic incentives to herd or to anti-herd when issuing forecasts of firms' earnings. This paper develops and implements a new test to examine whether such incentives exist and to identify the form of strategic behavior. We use the equilibrium property of the...

We investigate how corporate environmental responsibility (CER) actions affect firm value. We adopt an event studies approach using two narrowly-decided 5-to-4 Supreme Court rulings and show that firms gain value when they are expected to increase their CER activities. The market reactions are...

We hypothesize that firms are incentivized to manage corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategically as a result of social pressure, uncertain value implications, and investors' reliance on delimited measures of CSR performance. To test our hypotheses, we analyze Korean firms, whose ratings...