From Elihu Thomson and Herbert Dow in the late nineteenth century to Steve Jobs a hundred years later, many entrepreneurs have been stymied by their investors. In this paper, we use a simple model to explore how outcomes might have been different if entrepreneurs, instead of the investors, had...

Insiders can artificially deflect the market prices of financial instruments from their full-information or inside value' by issuing deceptive accounting reports. Incentive support for disinformational activity comes through forms of compensation that allow corporate insiders to profit...

We review an empirical literature that studies the role of social interactions in driving economic and financial decision making. We first summarize recent work that documents an important role of social interactions in explaining household decisions in housing and mortgage markets. This...

We study the role of morality in debt repayment, using an experiment with the credit card customers of a large Islamic bank in Indonesia. In our main treatment, clients receive a text message stating that "non-repayment of debts by someone who is able to repay is an injustice." This moral appeal...

Is shareholder interest in corporate social responsibility driven by pecuniary motives (abnormal rates of return) or non-pecuniary ones (willingness to sacrifice returns to address various firm externalities)? To answer this question, we categorize the literature into seven tests: (1) costs of...

We use plant-level data from the US Census of Manufacturers to study the short and long run effects of temperature on manufacturing activity. We document that temperature shocks significantly increase energy costs and lower the productivity of small manufacturing plants, while large plants are...

Do investors anticipate that demands for racial equity will impact companies? We explore this question in the context of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement--the largest racially motivated protest movement in U.S. history--and its effect on the U.S. policing industry using a novel dataset on...

We conduct a field experiment in partnership with the largest job platform in Brazil to study how environmental, social, and governance (ESG) practices of firms affect talent allocation. We find both an average job-seeker's preference for ESG and a large degree of heterogeneity across...

We show how firms scheduled to roll over debt in a crisis strategically reduce operations, regardless of their liquidity constraints. Our research design utilizes contractual features of commercial mortgages that generate as-good-as-random variation in whether debt is scheduled to mature during...

Since 1967, all French firms with more than 100 employees are required to share a fraction of their excess-profits with their employees. Through this scheme, firms with excess-profits distribute on average 10.5% of their pre-tax income to workers. In 1990, the eligibility threshold was reduced...