Firms with high levels of organization capital, a firm-specific production factor provided by key employees, are known to be risky and earn high stock returns. We argue that fragility of organization capital -- its sensitivity to potential disruptions -- is an independently important determinant...

This paper studies the diffusion of regional macroeconomic information into stock prices. I identify all U.S. states that are economically relevant for a company through textual analysis of annual reports and find that economic activity forecasts of company-relevant regions positively predict...

We study how intra-firm collocation — geographic clustering of business establishments owned by the same parent company — influences performance, decomposing the collocation effect into stocks and flows to learn about the mechanisms behind intra-firm agglomeration. Using Census micro data on...

We document that prior work experience of mutual fund managers outside of the asset management industry is valuable from an investment perspective in that it provides managers with a stock picking and industry timing advantage. Fund managers' stock picks from industries where they previously...

We assess the magnitude and mechanisms of workers' productivity spillovers by estimating the peer effects among those working in the same occupation across firms using the setting of security analysts. The empirical design exploits one feature of social networks: the existence of partially...

In this paper, we construct a novel measure of nepotism and explore its implications for firm value. We document that 35% of U.S. public firms employ relatives in top jobs. Using our measure, we show that nepotism decreases firm value: high-nepotism stocks underperform low-nepotism stocks by...

This paper asked the question of whether the behavior and compensation of interlocked executives and non-independent board of directors are consistent with the hypothesis of governance problem or whether this problem is mitigated by implicit and market incentives. It then analyzes the role of...

This paper shows that the impact of labor income risk on the cross-section of expected stock returns depends crucially on the horizon. Using a flexible empirical approach that allows us to include multiple horizons simultaneously, we find robust evidence that the two- to four-year horizon...

Recent empirical evidence suggests that skill-biased technological change that shifts labor demand towards non-routine jobs has accelerated during the Great Recession. We analyze the interaction between the gradual process of transition towards a skill intensive technology and business cycles in...

Our simple model features agents heterogeneous in skill and risk aversion, incomplete financial markets, and redistributive taxation. In equilibrium, agents become entrepreneurs if their skill is sufficiently high or risk aversion sufficiently low. Under heavier taxation, entrepreneurs are more...