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,...

We study the efficacy of remote working arrangements between CEOs and firms. Long-distance CEOs underperform according to operating performance, firm valuation, insider reviews, and announcement returns to CEO departures. These effects are stronger when the CEO lives further away and crosses...

Using novel data on bank applications to the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), we study the effect of government assistance on bank risk taking. Bailed-out banks initiate riskier loans and shift assets toward riskier securities after government support. However, this shift in risk occurs...

This paper uses recent regulations that have required some companies to increase the number of outside directors on their boards to generate estimates of the effect of board independence on performance that are largely free from endogeneity problems. Our main finding is that the effectiveness of...

Existing evidence shows that risk aversion and trust are largely determined by environmental factors. We test whether one such factor is peer influence. Using random assignment of MBA students to peer groups and predetermined survey responses of economic attitudes, we find causal evidence of...

We track the employment history of over 9,000 managers to study the effects of professional experiences on corporate policies. Our identification strategy exploits exogenous CEO turnovers and employment in other firms. Firms run by CEOs who experienced distress have less debt, save more cash,...

Industry size standards that determine eligibility for small business subsidies have vastly increased over the past decade. We exploit quasi-random variation in the implementation of size standard increases to study the effects on small firms, subsidy allocation, and industry outcomes using...