We examine how clawback provisions and board monitoring affect managers' use of discretion to achieve earnings targets. Using an experiment, we find that when board monitoring is weak, imposing clawback provisions has little impact on the total amount of earnings management activity. This null...

We use two experiments to examine the effects of relative performance information (RPI) on self-reported performance achieved by employees who exhibit varying degrees of narcissism. In experiment one, we find that high narcissists not only inflate self-reported performance more than low...

Using an employer-employee payroll dataset for approximately 2.6 million retail workers, we analyze the impact of the staggered rollout of a major e-commerce retailer's fulfillment centers on the income and employment of workers at geographically proximate brick-and-mortar retail stores. We find...

We provide new evidence that the bankruptcy filing of a locally headquartered and publicly-listed manufacturing firm imposes externalities on the local governments. Compared to matched counties with similar economic trends, municipal bond yields for affected counties increase by 10 bps within a...

Using a comprehensive sample of 2,585 bankruptcies from 1990 to 2019, we benchmark the performance of various machine learning models in predicting financial distress of publicly traded U.S. firms. We find that gradient boosted trees outperform other models in one-year-ahead forecasts. Variable...

We train a deep-learning based Natural Language Processing (NLP) model on various corporate sustainability frameworks in order to construct a comprehensive Environmental and Social (E&S) dictionary that incorporates materiality. We analyze the earnings conference calls of U.S. public firms...

We analyze the economic and financial impact of right-to-work (RTW) laws in the US. Using data from collective bargaining agreements, we show that there is a decrease in wages for unionized workers after RTW laws. Firms increase investment and employment but reduce financial leverage....

Industries with higher historical business cycle regime Sharpe ratios (RSR) have higher regime-dependent expected returns. Conditional on whether output gap is positive or negative, an out-of-sample long-high-RSR and short-low-RSR sector rotation strategy generates 14.02% annualized alpha in...

Using proprietary data from a major fund data provider, we analyze the screening activity of investment consultants (ICs) who advise institutional investors with trillions of dollars in assets. We find that ICs frequently shortlist funds using threshold screens clustered at round, base 5 or base...

In a recent working paper, "An application of causal forest in corporate finance: How does financing affect investment?" Gulen, Jens, and Page, April 23 2020, (GJP) challenge the analysis and several conclusions of our paper, "How Does Financing Impact Investment? The Role of Debt Covenants,"...