We explore whether the actions of one regulator can affect the efficacy of another regulator. We investigate this idea in the context of environmental enforcement, which is a primary mechanism to combat industrial pollution and climate change. Specifically, we examine whether bank regulatory oversight affects the ability of environmental enforcement to reduce industrial emissions. We predict that bank regulatory oversight can constrain the availability of bank loans, hindering firms' ability to obtain financing for greener technologies and thus mitigating the efficacy of environmental enforcement.

Increased corporation regulation in recent decades has raised the likelihood of regulatory oversight spillovers-the extent to which one agency's interactions with a regulated firm affects firm behaviors under the purview of another agency. We study how such spillovers can affect the mission of a specific regulator-the tax authority-using a measure of firm-specific exposure to fragmented regulation.

We reassess whether and to what degree the hiring, development, and promotion decisions of S&P 500® companies have led to misrepresentation of and bias against their minority executives. Instead of the US population benchmark that has conventionally been used to measure misrepresentation, and from such misrepresentation attribute the presence and magnitude of racial bias and discrimination, we measure misrepresentation in US executives using the benchmark of the racial/ethnic densities (RAEDs) of their college cohort peers.

Policies that require, or recommend, disclosure of corporate tax information are becoming more common throughout the world, as are examples of tax-related information increasingly influencing public policy and perceptions. In addition, companies are increasing the voluntary provision of tax-related information. We describe those trends and place them within a taxonomy of public and private tax disclosure.

We reassess whether and to what degree the hiring, development, and promotion decisions of S&P 500 companies has led to misrepresentation of and bias against their minority executives. Instead of the US population benchmark that has conventionally been used to measure misrepresentation, and from such misrepresentation attribute the presence and magnitude of racial bias and discrimination, we measure misrepresentation in US executives using the benchmark of the racial/ethnic densities (RAEDs) of their college cohort peers. Our key result is that the differences between US executive RAEDs and the RAEDs of their college peers are far smaller than those found using the US population, typically by an order of magnitude or more.

We examine the effects of an annual government social safety net payment on crime by leveraging geographic and intertemporal variation in the magnitude and timing of earned income tax credit (EITC) payments, combined with crime micro-data.

We examine how freedom of speech protections affect the nature and extent of employee disclosure. To identify the effect of freedom of speech protections, we use anti-strategic lawsuit against public participation (anti-SLAPP) laws, which punish lawsuits that censor or silence critics. We examine the effect of anti-SLAPP laws using a within firm-year design that compares employee disclosures for the same firm at the same point in time.

Prior research documents conflicting evidence that R&D investment both increases and decreases firm risk. We propose a parsimonious framework that explains this conflicting evidence.

We analyze large-scale establishment-level data to evaluate how county-level commercial property taxes influence business location decisions. We find that the propensity to favor lower-taxed counties is increasing in the tax differential between adjacent counties, and is decreasing in the distance to the border.

Building on the literature in linguistics showing that the manner in which individuals speak provides context incremental to the actual spoken words, we study whether uncertainty expressed via the acoustic features of managerial speech in conference calls impacts analyst behavior. Using a novel measure of managerial acoustic uncertainty, we find that when managers sound more uncertain in their responses to analyst questions, analyst forecast dispersion increases, even after accounting for characteristics of the actual language being used by managers and analysts.

Prior literature suggests many benefits stemming from founders’ strong identification with their firms. We suggest, however, that there is also a potential dark side. We argue that founders can become overidentified with their organizations, making them more likely to engage in irresponsible behavior that protects the firm but harms others, as moral and societal norms are viewed as obstacles to fulfilling an organization’s goals.

While activist short sellers can play a crucial role in fraud detection, they have come under scrutiny following accusations of systematically disseminating false negative information. We predict that the act of disclosure combined with pre-disclosure stock lending dynamics is informative about the quality of an activist’s private information. We find that increased pre-disclosure shorting intensity is associated with more negative post-disclosure returns, adverse media coverage, and consequential campaign outcomes, including auditor turnover, accounting restatements, class-action lawsuits, and performance-related delistings.