We study the impact of succession tournaments on risk-taking in family firms. More sons (less daughters) in controlling families are associated with higher income volatility and lower performance – especially, in opaque private firms with pyramidal ownership structure. Contestants exhibit...

This is the online appendix for 'Family Feud: Succession Tournaments and Risk-taking in Family Firms' available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=2703571.We identify succession as a novel determinant of risk-taking in family firms. We find significantly higher risk-taking (M&A and cash flow...

State governments receive an exogenous tax windfall whenever their residents win a multi-state lottery. These lottery tax windfalls are counter-cyclical but occur during a range of economic conditions. Therefore, lottery tax windfalls enable us to estimate the impact of fiscal policy on...

We study the role of insurance companies in propagating liquidity shocks to the real economy. We use natural disasters as our instrument to identify exogenous shifts in capital market liquidity, and study whether capital market liquidity affects regional-level fiscal conditions and drives GDP...

We find that consumption risk is lower in states that implement counter-cyclical fiscal policies. Moreover, firms whose investor base are concentrated in counter-cyclical states have lower stock returns, along with firms that relocate their headquarters to a counter-cyclical state. Therefore,...

This paper examines the impact of financial innovation on firm value, investment, and financing decisions. More specifically, we examine the effect of the introduction of weather derivatives on electric and gas utilities, arguably some of the most weather-exposed businesses in the economy....

We investigate economic and political theories of financial reform to analyze state-level adoption of municipal bankruptcy laws (Chapter 9). Using a dynamic Cox hazard model, we find that interest group factors related to the relative strength of potential losers (labor unions) and winners (bond...

Politicians preferentially treat firms in their electoral districts. We develop a model of home bias, which shows that a politician with limited political capacity grants a favor to local firms over non-local firms to satisfy voters and induce (re-)elections. We identify domestic firms that run...

Using economic deregulation as a quasi-natural experiment for increasing product market competition, we find increases in earnings manipulation and accounting frauds following deregulation. This “dark-side” of product market competition is particularly evident for deregulated firms in high...