In the early 1990s, the People's Republic of China opened its urban water sector to nonstate capital to help meet increasing urban water demand under severe water resource constraints. By 2007, more than 30% of urban water utilities had attracted private sector participation (PSP). To understand...

Ground-level ozone remains a serious problem in the United States. Because ozone non-attainment is a summer problem, episodic rather than continuous controls of ozone precursors are possible. We evaluate the costs and effectiveness of an episodic scheme that requires people to buy permits to...

Does corporate governance affect the timing of large investment projects? Hazard model estimates suggest strong shareholder governance may deter managers from pursuing large investments. Controlling for investment opportunities, firms with good governance experience longer spells between large...

We develop a framework to analyze urban water tariff setting and its welfare implications and apply it to a panel of cities in the People's Republic of China in the 2000s. First, we find that peer cities' water tariff levels have a significant influence on a city's choice of tariffs. We use the...

We document a capital supply channel in the connections between firms' and their peers' SEOs. Financially constrained firms are more likely to do an SEO (have higher SEO hazards) when more of their peers conducted an SEO within the prior six months. Positive exogenous shocks to indexer equity...

This paper examines the relationship between urban agglomeration and firm innovation using a recently developed dataset that consistently measures city boundaries across Asia together with geo-referenced firm-level data. It finds that the spatial distribution of innovation by firms is highly...

We examine whether firms take advantage of brief windows of opportunity to time seasoned equity offerings (SEOs) when their equity is substantially overvalued given managers' private information. We find that firms experiencing larger IPO underpricing, larger stock price run-ups after the IPO,...

This paper introduces a new city-level panel dataset constructed using satellite nighttime light imagery and grid population data. The dataset contains over 1,500 cities covering 43 economies of Asia and the Pacific from 1992 to 2016. With the dataset, we perform a variety of analyses for Asia...