We examine the consequences of corporate tax enforcement for business activity. Employing two different empirical approaches—a regional design and a firm-level design—we document that corporate tax enforcement is negatively associated with business activity. This association is economically significant and is robust to tests that mitigate concerns regarding endogeneity and measurement.
Lack of co-movement between consumption growth differentials and real exchange rates is a traditional indicator of a disconnect of foreign exchange markets from economic fundamentals (Backus-Smith 1993 anomaly). We present novel evidence for the (dis)connect between the volatilities, as opposed to the levels, of these variables. The volatility correlations are below one, but they are larger than the level correlations. In the cross-section of countries, the volatility disconnect weakens for countries with low amount of expected growth risk and high amount of volatility risk. We provide an explanation of our empirical findings based on international risk-sharing of both expected growth and volatility news shocks.
We review the accounting literature on innovation, focusing on the attributes of innovation that collectively make it unique from other resources: novelty, nonrivalry, and partial excludability. These unique attributes help innovation drive economic growth but create information-based challenges that accounting researchers are well-suited to address. We discuss the definition and measurement of innovation, then review the accounting literatures on the disclosure, management, financial reporting, taxation, and contracting and financing of innovation. For each of these literatures we identify challenges and opportunities for future research.
Health care costs in the United States make up a larger proportion of gross domestic product (GDP) than in any other developed country and continue to rise. We examine whether the use of consistent metrics in costing information systems across hospitals provides one avenue to reduce these costs. We refer to such consistency as “costing information consistency” or CIC and empirically measure it by identifying whether hospitals in a multihospital system share the same costing system vendor. Using M&A activity among vendors as an instrument for exogenous changes in hospital CIC, we find that CIC is associated with a 13.3% reduction in operating expenses, suggesting that increased cost comparability from CIC helps hospitals identify ways to reduce operating expenses by identifying clinical and administrative best practices.
Co-brands are strategically advantageous partnerships which can also involve risk. For example, Papa John’s gained access to the largest television audience in the US by sponsoring the National Football League (NFL), but later blamed stagnant sales on how the NFL’s handled players’ well-publicized protests of inequitable policing. What implications did Papa John’s prioritization of sales over fairness have for NFL consumption? To answer this question, the current research tests for changes in Sunday watch party rituals (SWPR), when U.S. consumers gather to socialize while watching live NFL games.
General Partners (GPs) in private equity face a trade-off between focusing their skills and effort on fewer investments to earn higher returns, or investing more broadly to reduce risk through diversification. Using a novel, deal-level dataset of 5,925 global investments from 1999 to 2016, we show that these portfolio considerations are important for understanding fund-level private equity returns.
This paper surveys the recent advances in machine learning method for economic forecasting. The survey covers the following topics: nowcasting, textual data, panel and tensor data, high-dimensional Granger causality tests, time series cross-validation, classification with economic losses.
This paper uses transaction-level import data at the shipment level to examine how multinational companies importing to the US have restructured their supply chains during the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that companies sourced from fewer locations, reduced the share of imports from China, and increased the share of imports from other Asian countries, such as India and Vietnam, and North American countries, such as Canada and Mexico. For managers, our results imply that a one-size-fits-all mentality regarding supply chain disruption responses is not appropriate, and companies’ disruption-response strategies need to be tailored to individual supply chains’ circumstances.
Prior research suggests that female negotiators often obtain worse outcomes than male negotiators. The current research examines whether this pattern extends to the large subset of men and women who identify as gays and lesbians. In particular, we interweave scholarship on gender stereotypes with work on intersectionality and MOSAIC theory to develop a theoretical model that anticipates how male and female negotiators will be treated at the bargaining table based on whether they are perceived to be heterosexual or homosexual.
This paper defines risk-on risk-off (RORO), an elusive terminology in pervasive use, as the variation in global investor risk aversion. Our high-frequency RORO index captures time-varying investor risk appetite across multiple dimensions: advanced economy credit risk, equity market volatility, funding conditions, and currency dynamics. The index exhibits risk-off skewness and pronounced fat tails, suggesting its amplifying potential for extreme, destabilizing events. Compared with the conventional VIX measure, the RORO index reflects the multifaceted nature of risk, underscoring the diverse provenance of investor risk sentiment. Practical applications of the RORO index highlight its significance for international portfolio reallocation and return predictability.
Yes. The quantity of risk underlying cross-sectional return spreads is time-varying, yielding swings in factors' risk premia. We define ``macro-relevant'' factors as those whose risk premium variation induce consumption fluctuations, and more broadly, a business-cycle.
Using machine learning techniques, we uncover an important number of dealers in the U.S. municipal bond market who focus on geographically adjacent states, a characteristic distinct from dealer centrality. These “specialized” dealers enjoy larger market shares in states with greater local ownership and in local bonds with more complex features. We also find that trades intermediated by these specialized dealers have significantly larger markups than those intermediated by national dealers.
Using firm-level administrative tax data, we document dramatic reductions in private leverage since the Global Financial Crisis, while leverage among public firms rose during this period. Our findings suggest that banks' credit supply plays a prominent role in explaining the leverage pattern of private firms.
We investigate claims that the complexity of the tax system discourages entrepreneurship. We use the implementation of tax filing assistance centers, which help entrepreneurs file their taxes, as sources of plausibly exogenous variation in the tax complexity effectively facing potential entrepreneurs.
This paper studies a long-term power purchase agreement (PPA) between a firm and a new renewable energy generator.
In the U.S. automobile industry, manufacturers distribute products through dealers and rental agencies. To mediate direct competition between the two intermediaries, manufacturers adopted buyback programs to repurchase used rental cars from rental agencies and redistribute them through dealers.
Hospital emergency departments (EDs) provide around-the-clock medical care and as such are generally modeled as nonterminating queues. However, from the care provider’s point of view, ED care is not a never-ending process, but rather occurs in discrete work shifts and may require passing unfinished work to the next care provider at the end of the shift.
We find that Credit Rating Agencies (CRAs) see through transitory shocks to credit risk that stem from transitory shocks to equity prices, while market-based measures of credit risk do not. For a given stock return, CRAs are significantly less likely to downgrade firms with transitory shocks than those with permanent shocks. However, credit default swap spreads and model-implied default probabilities do not distinguish between such shocks.
Little is known about how TMT members affect a founder-led firm’s performance later in a firm’s life. Using novel methods and a sample of over 2,000 firms, we find that although team structure has a significant impact on the performance of non-founder-led firms (consistent with past literature), it has little to no effect on the operating performance of founder-led firms, suggesting that founder CEOs may exert too much control.
We examine the implications of less powerful forward guidance for optimal policy using a sticky-price model with an effective lower bound (ELB) on nominal interest rates as well as a discounted Euler equation and Phillips curve. We find that, under a wide range of plausible degrees of discounting, it is optimal for the central bank to compensate for the reduced effect of a future rate cut by keeping the policy rate at the ELB for longer.