We hypothesize that corporate income taxes distort firms’ incentives to innovate by reducing their pledgeable income. Using a differences-in-differences methodology, we document that large corporate income tax cuts boost corporate innovation. We find a similar but opposite effect for tax increases. Most of the change in innovation occurs 2 or more years after the tax change, and there’s no effect before the tax change. Exploring the mechanisms, we show that tax cuts have a stronger impact on innovation for firms with weaker governance, greater financial constraints, fewer tangible assets, smaller patent stock, and a greater degree of tax avoidance.

Between 2009 and 2013, the Fly on the Wall (FLY) leaked 58% of recommendation revisions with a median delay of 27 minutes relative to the IBES announcement time. We show that FLY improves price discovery, but leaked recommendations hamper brokers’ ability to offer price improvement on trades routed through them. Three major brokers sued FLY; using key court dates, we show significant wealth and real effects to the brokerage industry. Overall, the speed with which analyst recommendations are disseminated has led to more rapid price discovery at the expense of a decline in the scope of the sell-side research industry.

The well-known weak empirical relationship between beta risk and the cost of equity (the beta anomaly) generates a simple tradeoff theory: As firms lever up, the overall cost of capital falls as leverage increases equity beta, but as debt becomes riskier the marginal benefit of increasing equity beta declines. As a simple theoretical framework predicts, we find that leverage is inversely related to asset beta, including upside asset beta, which is hard to explain by the traditional leverage tradeoff with financial distress that emphasizes downside risk. The results are robust to a variety of specification choices and control variables.

We study how media coverage impacts pricing of initial public offerings (IPOs) around the world. Higher media coverage in the pre-IPO period leads to lower IPO initial returns. The effect is mitigated in countries with better financial reporting quality, greater shareholder rights protection, and more stringent media censorship, and for IPOs “certified” by reputable intermediaries, while it is amplified in countries with higher levels of media penetration and media trust. Further, IPOs with higher pre-IPO media coverage have lower ex post price revision volatility. Our findings suggest that higher pre-IPO media coverage reduces information asymmetry among investors, leading to less underpriced IPOs.

We examine the effects of a temporary suspension of short-sale price tests on the options market. Consistent with the notion that put option trading substitutes for short selling, we find a significant reduction in put option volume. In addition, pressure on put option prices significantly declines, violations of the put-call parity become significantly less frequent, and option volume becomes less informed. Our findings add clarity to a long-standing debate on whether investors use options to circumvent equity short-selling restrictions.

We develop a multi-country model with moral hazard and noise traders and show that investor sentiment should affect employment growth both domestically and abroad. Using a large sample of international industry-level data, we find strong support for the model’s predictions. We show that U.S. investor sentiment has a positive association with labor market conditions around the world, due to spillover effects as well as foreign direct investments from the United States. We also find that U.S. sentiment amplifies the negative effect of local financial crises on job losses, which supports the idea that financial development has a “dark side.”

Firms with lower leverage are not only less likely to experience financial distress but are also better positioned to acquire assets from other distressed firms. With endogenous asset sales and values, each firm’s debt choice then depends on the choices of its industry peers. With indivisible assets, otherwise-identical firms may adopt different debt policies, with some choosing highly levered operations (to take advantage of ongoing debt benefits) and others choosing more conservative policies to wait for acquisition opportunities. Our key empirical implication is that the acquisition channel can induce firms to reduce debt when assets become more redeployable.

We examine the relevance of informal contracting mechanisms for corporate innovation. Using social capital to capture the social costs imposed on opportunistic behavior by management, we report evidence that firms headquartered in states with higher levels of social capital are associated with more innovation. This result is more pronounced when employees are more susceptible to holdup (e.g., firms with low labor union coverage, firms located in states with weak legal protections for employees, and firms surrounded by few external employment opportunities) and when employees face higher levels of information asymmetry. Our study highlights the importance of informal contracts for innovation.

We document a substantial customer complaint gap between stock and mutual financial firms. To assess whether this 21% per year complaint gap stems from complaint-prone customers in stock insurers, we examine state-adjudicated complaint success. To further delineate between customer selection or treatment explanations, we exploit within insurer complaints around random claims (natural disasters) and attention shocks (media scrutiny). Further tests reveal the complaint gap widens with greater competition, near insolvency thresholds, and with more price regulation. Overall, the results are inconsistent with the hypothesis that mutual financial firms exhibit low customer satisfaction, suggesting customers find this a beneficial organizational structure.

We document that fund managers are more likely to allocate assets to firms managed by executives and directors with whom they share a similar political partisan affiliation. We find that this bias is not associated with improved fund performance. Funds with more partisan bias suffer from higher levels of idiosyncratic volatility than those with less bias. Partisan bias is more evident when fund managers are less experienced, in more informationally opaque firms, and when the U.S. president comes from fund managers’ own party. These findings suggest that political partisan bias among fund managers may be due to in-group favoritism.