On average, women comprise a smaller share of deaths from COVID-19. Variation in the share of COVID-19 deaths for women across countries and US States suggests that biological factors cannot fully account for this gender difference. I hypothesize that women’s participation in the workforce is...

In 2017, the board of AFFECT (the Academic Female Finance Committee) proposed that the AFA carry out a professional culture survey.Some key observations are as follows:Among individuals working in academic finance, women and men have similar preferences regarding the importance of achievement...

Thought leadership in academic finance is more unequal than in other fields. Using data on the top 2% of scientists across all fields from Ioannidis et al. (2019, 2020), we show that the set of top scientists in finance is less diverse in terms of gender and geography than in economics and other...

Does petitioning Congress work? We find that positions advanced in both consumer group and trade association letters predict the voting behavior of legislators. We examine whether congressmembers appear responsive to letters by consumer groups and finance trade associations concerning 821 bills...

This paper is a survey of the literature on boards of directors, with an emphasis on research done subsequent to the Benjamin E. Hermalin and Michael S. Weisbach (2003) survey. The two questions most asked about boards are what determines their makeup and what determines their actions? These...

We develop a model in which competition in the labor market may produce worker-firm matches that are inferior to those obtained in the absence of competition. This result contrasts with the conventional wisdom that competition among employers allocates scarce talent efficiently. In a model in...

Profit-maximizing firms should fill job positions at the lowest possible cost. Because employees may have preferences over the attributes of their jobs, we can view this problem as one of finding the optimal way to sell job attributes to potential employees. In this paper, we characterize the...

We use instrumental variables methods to disentangle the effect of founder–CEOs on performance from the effect of performance on founder–CEO status. Our instruments for founder–CEO status are the proportion of the firm's founders that are dead and the number of people who founded the...