Using data on the qualifications and residential locations of directors, we study boards “in practice.” We find that directors' qualifications and distance from headquarters are related to factors such as the proximity of headquarters to a large city, firm size, CEO power, and the board's...

Recent literature has shown that gender diversity in the boardroom seems to influence key monitoring decisions of boards. In this paper, we examine whether the observed relation between gender diversity and board decisions is due to a confounding factor, namely, directors' geographic distance...

We examine how the director independence mandates of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) and related reforms affected board geography and the quality of financial reporting. Using 1998-2006 data on the residential addresses of individual directors, we document that the geographic proximity to...

We use firms’ discretionary choices in the CEO pay ratio disclosure to examine corporate decisions under social pressure. Reported pay ratios are significantly lower when firms use complex methods to identify the median employee, whose total pay is the denominator in the ratio. Firms choose...

We identify and characterize order splitting strategies in an automated limit order market. We model the market conditions and order characteristics, which lead to the use of order splitting strategies. We find a positive correlation between price aggressiveness and the propensity to split an...

This paper investigates whether political orientation has an influence on residential real estate returns in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. Using county level housing data from January to June 2020, we document that the Democratic counties and the counties with higher prosocial scores...

We find a significant price premium ($21,000+ per house on average) for houses with energy-saving (green) features. Using hand-collected data to estimate the house-specific NPV of individual green features, we find that the economic value of green feature(s) cannot explain the green price...