Prior literature proposes that firms can use corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities to signal their quality to investors and other stakeholders. We test this prediction by identifying exogenous situations that call for signaling. Using two independent quasi-natural experiments that...

Takeover bidders in stock-for-stock mergers have strong incentives to increase their own pre-merger stock prices to lower their acquisition costs. We find that before announcements of stock mergers, bidders manage down analyst earnings forecasts prior to earnings releases. Such expectation...

We analyze the effects of institutional cross-ownership of same-industry firms on product market performance and behavior. Our results show that cross-held firms experience significantly higher market share growth than non-cross-held firms. We establish causality by relying on a...

Using unique U.S. Census data sets, we analyze how entrepreneurial firms' product market characteristics affect their choice between going public, being acquired, or remaining private. Size, total factor productivity (TFP), sales growth, capital expenditure, market share, access to private...

Using granular, individual-level compensation data, we study the within-firm difference in pay growth between executives and non-executive employees (i.e., “pay growth gap”). Our results reveal an asymmetric relation between a firm's pay growth gap and the “skill” (idiosyncratic)...

Municipal solid waste management continues to be a major challenge for local governments in both urban and rural areas across the world, and one of the key issues is their financial constraints. Recently an economic analysis was conducted in Eryuan, a poor county located in Yunnan Province of...

In many cases, the relationship between environmental pollution and economic development can be generally depicted by an inverted U-shaped curve, or an environmental Kuznets curve, where pollution increases with income at the beginning and decreases after a certain level of income. However, what...

Economic analyses of development projects and policies often involve assigning an economic value to changes in the risk of loss of human life. A typical term used in the economic analyses is the value of statistical life, which reflects the aggregation of individuals' willingness to pay for...

We examine whether short sellers exacerbate or mitigate managerial myopia by using a firm's patenting activities to capture managers' myopic behavior. To establish causality, we use exogenous variation in short-selling costs generated by a quasi-natural experiment, Regulation SHO, which removes...

We study rating shopping on the MBS market. Outside of AAA, losses were higher on single-rated tranches than multi-rated ones, and yields predict future losses for single-rated tranches but not for multi-rated ones. Conversely, ratings have less explanatory power for single-rated tranches. These...