Scholars have called for additional research into the antecedents to corporate political activity (CPA), including why firms may engage in specific kinds of CPA. In response, in what we believe to be a first-of-itskind study, we rely on upper echelons theory to explore the relationship between...

This study examines the impact of firms' overall corporate policy risk on stock liquidity. This study constructs a novel overall corporate policies risk index (PRI) for firms by capturing risk embedded in managers' different policy decisions, such as investment, financing, diversification, and...

The trade war with China has cost US producers and consumers hundreds of billions of dollars since 2018. Yet relatively few US businesses took action to oppose it. This study reports the results of an elite survey experiment on business political activity toward trade policy. Researchers...

We show the effect of CEOs' characteristics on corporate risk-taking of a hand-collected sample of 369 Latin American listed firms from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru for the period 2005-2020. We study six traits: CEOs’ age, tenure, gender, duality (i.e., holding...

This paper uses ChatGPT, a large language model, to extract managerial expectations of corporate policies from disclosures. We create a firm-level ChatGPT investment score, based on conference call texts, that measures managers’ anticipated changes in capital expenditures. We validate the...

Textbook theory assumes that firm managers maximize the net present value of future cash flows. But when you ask them, the people running large public corporations say that they are maximizing something else entirely: earnings per share (EPS). Perhaps this is a mistake. No matter. We take...

Using natural language processing, we identify corporate goals stated in the shareholder letters of the 150 largest companies in the United States from 1955 to 2020. Corporate goals have proliferated, from less than one on average in 1955 to more than 7 in 2020. While in 1955, profit...

In this article, we seek to contribute to the literature on corporate political activity (CPA) by exploring the impact of CEO values on this nonmarket activity. Building a database of CEO values by analyzing the text of quarterly earnings conference call transcripts, we test whether firms with...

We survey a representative sample of the U.S. population to understand stakeholders’ desire to see their firms exit Russia after the invasion of Ukraine. 61% of respondents think that firms should exit Russia, regardless of the consequences. Only 37% think that leaving Russia is a purely...

Using natural language processing, we identify and categorize the corporate goals in the shareholder letters of the 150 largest companies in the United States, from 1955 to 2020. Corporate goals have proliferated during this period from an average of two in 1955 to almost 10 in 2020. We find a...

Defining Corporate Social Responsibility -- Legal Approaches to Corporate Social Responsibility: Viewing Corporate Social Responsibility through a legal lens -- Changing dimensions to legal approaches to CSR due to COVID and post-COVID impacts: Experiences from the Asian and Asia Pacific regions...

Eine verantwortungsvolle Unternehmensführung (RBC) verfolgt das Ziel einen Beitrag zum wirtschaftlichen, ökologischen und sozialen Fortschritt zu leisten und nachteilige Effekte, die im Zusammenhang mit der Tätigkeit, den Produkten oder Dienstleistungen eines Unternehmens stehen, zu vermeiden...

We study whether CEO political ideology affected how S&P 500 firms reacted to the Covid-19 pandemic, an exogenous shock to demand and supply. We hypothesize that conservative CEOs are more likely to adopt shareholder-friendly than employee-friendly reactions to the pandemic. Hence, they should...

Purpose: We investigate the effect of uncertain times on LGBT-supportive corporate policies, exploiting a novel text-based measure of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) recently constructed by Baker et al. (2016). LGBT-supportive policies have attracted a great deal of attention in the media...

Firms increasingly take stances on polarizing issues but at the same time invest in political activities that may contradict their claims. In this paper, we analyze whether firms’ sociopolitical claims and political activities are aligned. We develop a dictionary of claims related to diversity...

Individuals with an Anglo-Saxon cultural background are customarily considered to be less risk-averse than other individuals. The validity of this assumption appears to be borne out in the world of corporate finance. We investigate the risk-related corporate decisions of the board of directors,...

We theoretically examine voting for corporate policies when shareholders or board members face a trade-off between maximizing firm value and implementing social objectives (like minimizing pollution). If voters care about one social objective, we show that voting can successfully aggregate...

Syndicated loans integrate bank monitoring with risk sharing similar to corporate bonds. Consistent with this argument, we find that firms use more loans and fewer bonds, and increase capital expenditures, after initial access to the syndicated loan market. The growth of collateralized loan...

Why do competitive firms in the US provide paid parental leave (PPL)? Which firms do and to what extent? We use several firm- and individual-level data sets to answer these questions. These include the BLS-Employee Benefit Survey (EBS) for 2010 to 2018 and an extensive firm-level data collection...

Eine verantwortungsvolle Unternehmensführung (RBC) verfolgt das Ziel einen Beitrag zum wirtschaftlichen, ökologischen und sozialen Fortschritt zu leisten und nachteilige Effekte, die im Zusammenhang mit der Tätigkeit, den Produkten oder Dienstleistungen eines Unternehmens stehen, zu vermeiden...

Using natural language processing, we identify and categorize the corporate goals in the shareholder letters of the 150 largest companies in the United States, from 1955 to 2020. Corporate goals have proliferated during this period from an average of two in 1955 to almost 10 in 2020. We find a...