We study the effect of senior manager oversight on inventors' productivity. We use changes in travel times between inventors and their employer's headquarters caused by flight time changes as sources of plausibly exogenous variation in manager oversight of inventors. We find that oversight...

There is limited empirical evidence on when and why individuals incur costs to acquire information about a firm that is not publicly available, which we refer to as private information acquisition. This lack of evidence is due in large part to the difficulty of observing private information...

We examine the relation between managers' personal income tax rates and their corporate investment decisions. Using plausibly exogenous variation in federal and state tax rates, we find a positive relation between managers' personal tax rates and their corporate risk-taking. Moreover — and...

We examine the relation between manager horizon and discretionary disclosure, using patenting as a measure of disclosure. Patenting reflects, in part, a manager's decision to disclose the successful outcome of research and development (R&D). When a firm invests in R&D but does not patent,...

We find that firms' tax planning exhibits strategic reactions: firms respond to changes in their industry-competitors' tax planning by changing their own tax planning in the same direction. We document evidence of these strategic reactions in two distinct research settings that entail an...

We examine how firms' accounting quality affects their reaction to monetary policy. The balance sheet channel of monetary policy predicts that the quality of firms' accounting reports plays a role in transmitting monetary policy by affecting information asymmetries between firms and capital...

We examine how executives' ability to control their firm's exposure to risk affects the design of their incentive-compensation contracts. Using the introduction of exchanged-traded weather derivatives as a natural experiment, we find that executives who became more able to control their firm's...

I examine the effects of proprietary information on corporate transparency and voluntary disclosure. To do so, I develop and validate two measures of firms' reliance on trade secrecy: one based on 10-K disclosures and one based on subsequent litigation outcomes. I complement these measures by...

The patent system grants inventors temporary monopoly rights in exchange for a public disclosure detailing their innovation. These disclosures are meant to allow others to recreate and build on the patented innovation. We examine how the quality of these disclosures affects follow-on innovation....