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...

Atanasov and Black (2015) (AB) analyzes potential limitations of empirical studies that use shock-based IV designs, focusing specifically on our article that studies the effect of board independence on firm value (Duchin et al., 2010). With regard to our study, AB raises three concerns with our...

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,...

Using daily fluctuations in local sunshine as an instrument for sentiment, we study its effect on day-to-day decisions of lower-level financial officers. Positive sentiment is associated with higher credit approvals, and negative sentiment has the opposite effect of a larger magnitude. These...

The empirical distribution of firms' market capitalizations is shown to be in excellent agreement with a very skewed lognormal distribution: the largest firms are about 1000 times larger than the median firm. Can this skewed size distribution be consistent with mean-variance portfolio...