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 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...

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...