We investigate the consequences of the “revolving door” for trial lawyers at the SEC’s enforcement division. If future job opportunities motivate SEC lawyers to develop and/or showcase their enforcement expertise, then the revolving door phenomenon will promote more aggressive regulatory...

We investigate the effect of say-on-pay (SOP) proposals on changes in executive and director compensation. Relative to non-SOP firms, SOP firms' total compensation to CEOs does not significantly change after the proposal. Although the total compensation does not change, the mix of compensation...

The leverage of unregulated U.S. corporations has decreased markedly since 1992. We find greater power by institutional investors explains part of this deleveraging trend. Removing legal barriers enhanced institutions' influence and enabled them to induce firms to move toward more efficient...

China's industrial policies ("Five-Year Plans") displace U.S. production/employment and heighten plant closures in the same industries as those targeted by the policies in China. The impact was not anticipated by the stock market, but U.S. companies in the "treated industries" suffer a valuation...

We examine U.S. multinationals' choice of tax avoidance strategies. We find that firms capable of one strategy (profit shifting) are less likely to use a different strategy (inversion), even though inverting would eliminate higher repatriation-related taxes faced by profit-shifting firms. Three...

The perceived increase in corporate political influence has raised concerns that corporations advance policies that benefit capital and harm labor. We examine whether money in politics harms labor using the surprise Supreme Court ruling Citizens United v. FEC (2010), which rendered bans on...

The central problem for financial regulation is reducing systemic risk. Systemic risk is the risk that the failure of one significant institution can cause or significantly contribute to the failure of other significant institutions. This paper addresses the five most important policies for...

Public sector unions around the world are under threat from political forces. Combined, the financial crisis and austerity measures have challenged public sector unions’ legitimacy. In the U.S., the postrecession assault on public sector unions is rooted in political ideology, with not only a...

Hierarchical firms are enterprises with rigid internal job ladders. We examine the state enterprise as the prototypical hierarchical firm. In the state enterprise, promotion of employees through the internal hierarchy is determined by the workers’ allocation of time between rent seeking and...

This paper shows that the abolition of state guarantees to publicly owned banks in Germany resulted in an increase in refinancing costs at German savings banks. Rather than being the result of increased market discipline, the increase in refinancing costs is shown to be driven by spillover...