Using tools described in our earlier work (Hassan et al., 2019, 2020), we develop text-based measures of the costs, benefits, and risks listed firms in the US and over 80 other countries associate with the spread of Covid-19 and other epidemic diseases. We identify which firms expect to gain or...

We adapt simple tools from computational linguistics to construct a new measure of political risk faced by individual US firms: the share of their quarterly earnings conference calls that they devote to political risks. We validate our measure by showing it correctly identifies calls containing...

Many decisions are made based on persuasion. In the persuasion process, self-interested agents produce information to convince an evaluator to approve their proposals. Whether an evaluator will discount the agents' suggestions and reject their proposal is neither clear nor obvious. We highlight...

This study examines if geographical variation in the dominant religion of a firm's location is associated with its ownership structures. We contrast two Christian faiths, Protestantism and Catholicism, which—despite theological similarities—have been associated with contrasting preferences...

We examine the effect of firm-level political risk on debt markets. While prior research relies mainly on economy-wide proxies for political risk, Hassan et al. (2019) suggests that a substantial amount of political risk plays out at the firm-level. We use their measure to show that...

Accounting performance measures are often argued to lead to short-sighted behavior by managers facing intertemporal decisions. We assess the association between different types of performance measures and the time horizon of business unit managers who have profit responsibility. Our results,...