Working Papers

We examine the labor market consequences of the 2020 Regulation S-K requiring human capital disclosure in 10K filings. Using large-sample job-level data, we observe that public firms subject to the regulation increase their disclosure of…

U.S. partnerships control more than $40 trillion in assets, vastly outnumber U.S. public firms, and contribute significantly to the U.S. tax non-compliance of pass-through entities, which is larger than the non-compliance of publicly traded…

Companies in various industries are under growing pressure to assess the costs of decarbonizing their operations. This paper develops a generic abatement cost concept to identify the cost-efficient combination of technological and operational…

The rapidly growing number of lithium-ion battery packs deployed in electric vehicles (EVs) entails enormous economic potential for used EV batteries to be redeployed in a second life application, e.g., for behind-the-meter stationary energy…

We study the tax payment and innovation consequences of limiting the tax deductibility of research and development (“R&D”) expenditures. Beginning in 2022, U.S. companies are required to capitalize and amortize R&D rather than immediately…

While agency theory has strongly influenced real-world compensation plans, most observed compensation plans are not explicit about their economic assumptions. In this study, we derive closed-form expressions to infer the cost of effort, the…

We examine the effects of stock market access, and in particular trading hours, on retail investment performance. Using discontinuities around time zone borders, we find that plausibly exogenous decreases in waking trading hours are associated…

We study how the assignment of intellectual property rights for successful innovations between inventors and their employers affect inventor-employer matching, the generality of innovation, and innovation disclosure. To do so, we examine the…

We identify a model of early-stage company growth persistence. Using seven commercial high growth company lists (either a Top 500 or Top 100 list of companies), we find that approximately 30% of companies remain on these lists for two consecutive…

We examine the role of assurance — third-party verification — on carbon accounting quality. We develop a measure of carbon accounting quality based on the deviation of reported emissions from a model-based expected level and use two other survey-…

Using debit and credit card data, we find a one standard-deviation increase in firms’ earnings surprise is linked to a 3% or $5.6 billion increase in aggregate quarterly consumption of local households near the disclosing firms’ headquarters. The…

Innovative public firms sell 9.6% (615) more patents in the last month, relative to the first half of the fiscal year. Consistent with reporting incentives driving these sales, they are more pronounced among firms with strong incentives to meet…

We analyze the efficiency and efficacy of human and intellectual capital investment to better understand the effects of social investment. Existing literature in the corporate setting lacks analysis regarding the impact of human and intellectual…

We examine how the efficiency of the judicial system impacts corporate innovation. To do so, we exploit a pilot program introduced by the U.S. Congress in 2011, which allowed judges with expertise(as opposed to randomly selected judges) to…

Current corporate disclosures regarding carbon emissions lack commonly accepted accounting rules. The carbon accrual accounting system described here takes the rules of historical cost accounting for operating assets as a template for generating…

We examine the relationship between public firm disclosure and aggregate new business formation. Consistent with the notion that public company disclosures provide information spillovers that reduce the extent of uncertainty about new…

This paper studies whether tax policies in developed nations affect developing economies. We study firm investment responses to a major reform that reduced the corporate income tax rate for U.K.-based firms. Our identification strategy compares…

We study price and non-price provisions of debt contracts to gauge how creditors evaluate changes in senior executives’ personal income taxes (“managerial taxes”) of their borrowers. Because managers’ personal income taxes can exacerbate…

The under-representation of women in the technology industry has long been recognized as a concern, and the provision of gender-specific information on job search platforms has emerged as a potential solution. In this research, we study how…

We provide the first, large sample evidence on third-party verification of firms’ environmental and social metrics in ESG reports (“ESG assurance”) in the United States. Focusing on S&P 500 firms from 2010-2020, we document a striking…