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...

A growing body of evidence suggests that the benefits of international diversification via developed markets have dramatically declined. While emerging markets still offer diversification opportunities, their public equity indices capture only a fraction of economic activity of emerging...

We show that labor search frictions are an important determinant of the cross-section of equity returns. Empirically, we find that firms with low loadings on labor market tightness outperform firms with high loadings by 6% annually. We propose a partial equilibrium labor market model in which...

Prior studies have documented that pension plan sponsors rigorously monitor a fund's performance relative to a benchmark. We use a first-difference approach to show that in an effort to beat benchmarks, fund managers controlling large pension assets tend to increase their exposure to high-beta...

Prior theory suggests that time variation in the degree to which leverage constraints bind affects the pricing kernel. We propose a measure for this leverage constraint tightness by inverting the argument that constrained investors tilt their portfolios to riskier assets. We show that the...

Using individual census records, we provide novel evidence on CEOs' socioeconomic backgrounds and study their role in investment decisions. Male CEOs allocate more investment capital to male than female division managers. This gender gap is driven by CEOs who grew up in male-dominated families...

This paper shows that the gender and age of the wage-setter are crucial determinants of the disparity in wages between sexes. We document our findings using a dataset on compensation of corporate officers that is uniquely suited for this analysis because officer wages are set by chief executive...

A closet indexer is more likely to meet a value-weighted investment benchmark by value-weighting the portfolio. Following this intuition, we introduce a simple measure of active management, the absolute difference between the value weights and the actual weights held by a fund, averaged across...

The Fama-French factors are ubiquitous in empirical finance, industry, and law. We find that factor returns differ substantially depending on when the data were downloaded. The effects of these retroactive changes are large. Holding the sample period constant and varying only factor vintages, we...