When a significant event occurs at a publicly traded company, federal law requires the firm to disclose this information to investors in a securities filing known as a Form 8-K. But the firm need not disclose immediately; instead, SEC rules give companies four business days after the event...

We show that the Securities and Exchange Commission's system for disseminating market-moving information in securities filings gives some investors an advantage over others. We describe two systems — the SEC's file transfer protocol (FTP) server and public dissemination service (PDS) — that...

We show that CEO golden parachute contracts are responsive to a tax on golden parachutes, and CEO option exercises are responsive to these contracts. In particular, as a consequence of a tax code provision penalizing parachutes greater than 3 times taxable income, CEO parachute contracts...

For years, the SEC accidentally distributed securities disclosures to some investors before the public. This setting is unique because the delay until public disclosure was exogenous and the private information window was well-defi ned, which we exploit to study informed trading with a random...

We provide a quantitative metric for assessing the increase in the importance of and attention to corporate governance over the past two decades. The metric is based on the use of the terms corporate governance or governance by publicly traded companies. In particular, we use Python...

We use a natural experiment — an unexpected judicial decision — to study how the legal enforceability of debt contracts affects consumer lending. In May 2015, a federal court unexpectedly held that the usury laws of three states — New York, Connecticut, and Vermont — applied to certain...

There are two competing theories of why public companies pay executives generous retirement benefits. One is that retirement pay is easier to hide from shareholders than other forms of compensation. The other is that retirement benefits align executives' interests with those of long-term...

The European Commission has often used its merger-review power to challenge high-profile acquisitions involving non-EU companies, giving rise to concerns that its competition authority has evolved into a powerful tool for industrial policy. The Commission has been accused of deliberately...

Financial advisor misconduct often has devastating consequences, leading lawmakers to seek tightened investor protections at the federal level. But many advisors can choose whether to be federally regulated or instead overseen by state insurance regulators, giving advisors with a history of...

The growth of the prison population in the United States over the past twenty-five years has yielded a number of complex policy debates, including the efficacy of lengthy sentences as a deterrent of crime, the social costs of imprisoning a growing proportion of American citizens, and the...