A large literature documents a positive correlation between a firm's sustainability or ESG policies and firm value. However, the exact mechanism through which this relation arises remains ambiguous and it is often hard to establish the direction of causation. In this paper we propose and test...

This chapter surveys recent econometric methodologies for inference in large dimensional conditional factor models in finance. Changes in the business cycle and asset characteristics induce time variation in factor loadings and risk premia to be accounted for. The growing trend in the use of...

We develop a penalized two-pass regression with time-varying factor loadings. The penalization in the first pass enforces sparsity for the time-variation drivers while also maintaining compatibility with the no arbitrage restrictions by regularizing appropriate groups of coefficients. The second...

Policymakers fear artificial intelligence (AI) will disrupt labor markets, especially for high-skilled workers. We investigate this concern using novel, task-specific data for security analysts. Exploiting variation in AI's power across stocks, we show analysts with portfolios that are more...

The large regional variation in minimum wage levels in the period 2002-08 in China implies that Chinese manufacturing firms experienced competitive shocks as a function of firm location and their low-wage employment share. We find that minimum wage hikes accelerate the input substitution from...