"American markets, once a model for the world, are giving up on competition. Thomas Philippon blames the unchecked efforts of corporate lobbyists. Instead of earning profits by investing and innovating, powerful firms use political pressure to secure their advantages. The result is less...

We argue that earnings management and fraudulent accounting have important economic consequences. In a model where the costs of earnings management are endogenous, we show that in equilibrium, low-productivity firms hire and invest too much in order to pool with high productivity firms. This...

We study the consequences of earnings management for the allocation of resources among firms, and we argue that fraudulent accounting has important economic consequences. We first build a model where the costs of earnings management are endogenous, and we show that, in equilibrium, bad managers...