Does financing respond to changes in productive opportunities even for the world's poor? We shed light by examining the response of private bank financing to a rural road-building program in India. The program prioritized roads for villages above explicit population thresholds, allowing us to...

Do the legal rights of creditors influence whether firms borrow from arm's length or relationship lenders in a country? In this paper, we examine this question by exploiting the staggered adoption of legal reforms that changed creditor rights. We show that as creditor rights strengthen, firms...

This paper studies the conflict between ESG funds and their investors. Funds trade-off greater short-term financial performance against long-term sustainability. This conflict results in ESG funds voting against their stated pro-social mandate, even when supported by proxy advisors. Lower...

We study the long-term effect of gender quotas in India, the first country with strong patriarchal norms to mandate female directors. Five years after the reform, female director appointments increase from less than 10% to over 20%. Almost half of the firms appoint and retain female directors...

We study the real effects of environmental activist investing. Using plant-level data, we find that targeted firms reduce their toxic releases, greenhouse gas emissions, and cancer-causing pollution. Improvements in air quality within a one-mile radius of targeted plants suggest potentially...

Do the legal rights of creditors influence whether firms borrow from arm's length or relationship lenders in a country? We examine this question by exploiting the staggered adoption of legal reforms that changed creditor rights. We find that as creditor rights strengthen, firms exhibit a greater...

This study examines whether personal liability for corporate malfeasance deters individuals from serving as independent directors. Exploiting the introduction of personal liability in India, we find that personal liability deters individuals from serving on corporate boards. We find stronger...

We provide the first large-sample evidence of foreign influence in US politics, showing that meetings between foreign countries and legislators affect government resource allocation directly for countries and indirectly for firms. To do so, we introduce a comprehensive dataset of date-stamped...

We study capital allocations to managers with two mutual funds, and show that investors learn about managers from their performance records. Flows into a fund are predicted by the manager's performance in his other fund, especially when he outperforms and when signals from the other fund are...