Small business size standards increased considerably in the United States since 2002. Following their staggered introduction across industries, we find lower shares of small businesses in industry establishments and employment and declines in job creation and business formation. Consequently,...

Little is known about how firms manage cash policy over time. This paper fills this gap by examining if and how firms manage cash toward a target cash ratio. Estimating partial adjustment models of cash, we find that firms actively adjust their cash toward a target; however, the speed of...

We show that ongoing zero portfolio weights in cryptocurrency are surprisingly difficult to generate in a standard Bayesian portfolio theory framework. With ten years of prior data, equity market investors would need very pessimistic priors on mean returns to justify never having bought...

This paper provides novel evidence on the role of pollution in the divestitures of industrial plants. We find that firms divest pollutive plants following scrutinized environmental risk incidents. Following these divestitures, however, total pollution levels at the sold plants do not decline,...

This paper studies the relation between corporate liquidity and diversification. The key finding is that multidivision firms hold significantly less cash than stand-alone firms because they are diversified in their investment opportunities. Lower cross-divisional correlations in investment...

This paper provides novel evidence that similarity in employees' political attitudes plays a role in mergers and acquisitions. Using detailed data on individual campaign contributions to Democrats and Republicans, our estimates show that firms are considerably more likely to announce a merger,...