We investigate whether firms restructure board composition to align with changes in their contracting environment. Board size and independence increase with firm complexity, consistent with theoretical predictions. However, the hypothesized negative relationship between board independence and...

Since the 1990s, China's real estate market has experienced a dramatic and long-lasting boom across China. This boom has led to substantial concerns in both academic and policy circles that the rising housing prices might have developed into a gigantic housing bubble, which might eventually...

Research has shown that many managers and entrepreneurs tend to be optimistic and are inclined to believe that negative shocks happen to them less frequently than to others. However, there is also evidence suggesting that such optimism is often inaccurate in reality and managerial optimism can...

Should a payment intermediary (e.g. American Express, PayPal, etc.) be allowed to require merchants to charge the same price for customers who pay via the platform as they charge other customers? We build a model that highlights certain under-appreciated aspects of this questions. Taking these...

Cost stickiness measures the degree of suboptimal cost reduction in response to a decline in a firm's activity. This study examines the role of institutional monitoring in addressing the value-decreasing cost-stickiness problem exhibited in many firms. Using alternative proxies for institutional...

Recent research has found that the Taylor-rule fundamentals have power to forecast changes in U.S. dollar exchange rates out of sample. Our work casts some doubt on that claim. However, we find strong evidence of a related in-sample anomaly. When we include U.S. inflation in the well-known...

We find that local Chinese officials with stronger career concerns were more reluctant to impose COVID-19 lockdown policies. Local officials win promotions by posting strong economic growth numbers in their regions, but lockdowns can suppress growth. We show that local officials who would have...

This study examines the effects of local stock returns on antidepressant usage using the Truven Health MarketScan® individual prescription drug data. There are three main findings. First, a one standard deviation decrease in local stock return increases local investor's antidepressant usage by...

This paper empirically examines the role of radical grain yield targets in triggering China's Great Famine (1959-1961), one of the largest man-made catastrophes in human history. Starting from 1958, the Chinese central government assigned different grain yield targets to most counties based on...