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...

Despite being an integral part of modern economic science, the subject of financial economics has deep historical roots. Geoffrey Poitras provides an exhaustive account of the early development of the subject and, in so doing, provides a sound basis for the study of modern financial economics....

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...

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...