Politicians and regulators rely on feedback from the public when setting policies. For-profit corporations and non-pro t entities are active in this process and are arguably expected to provide independent viewpoints. Policymakers (and the public at large), however, may be unaware of the...

We explore the role of charitable giving as a means of political influence. For philanthropic foundations associated with large U.S. corporations, we present three different identification strategies that consistently point to the use of corporate social responsibility in ways that parallel the...

We study the relationship between the political connections of Chinese firms and workplace fatalities. In our preferred specification we find that the worker death rate for connected companies is two to three times that of unconnected firms (depending on the sample employed), a pattern that...

Abstract We examine Chinese cities' COVID-19 reopening plans as a window into governments' economic and social priorities. Early reopenings are predicted by citizen discontent, as captured by Baidu searches for terms such as “unemployment” and “protest” in the prior week. Taking a longer...