This paper investigates the relationship between US MNCs' valuations and anti-Americanism in countries where MNCs' foreign subsidiaries are located. We find that MNCs suffer value-destruction when they enter markets where people express severe anti-Americanism. However, we uncover that...

Many developing countries are afflicted by persistent inequality in the distribution of income. While a growing body of literature emphasize differential fertility as a channel through which income inequality persists, this paper investigates differential child mortality - differences in the...

The positive impact of early intervention on children's cognitive and behavioural outcomes is now well-recognized in the developed world. However, little is known about whether these programs confer similar benefits in developing countries. This paper focuses on the effect of preschool...

Uneven success of poverty-based approaches calls for a re-think of the causes behind persistent child labour in many developing societies. We develop a theoretical model to highlight the role of income inequality as a channel of persistence. The interplay between income inequality and...

We show that political geography has a pervasive effect on the cross-section of stock returns. We collect election results over a 40-year period and use a political alignment index (PAI) of each state's leading politicians with the ruling (presidential) party to proxy for local firms’...

We show that firm headquarters’ geographic proximity to political power centers (state capitals) is associated with higher abnormal returns. Consistent with the notion that this effect is rooted in social network links, we find it is more pronounced in communities with high levels of...

We find that post-merger equity risk is negatively related to the sensitivity of CEO wealth to stock return volatility (vega), but is concentrated in CEOs with high proportions of options and options that are more in-the-money. The probability of industrial diversification also increases in...

This study investigates whether stock price performance contains a sizeable component that emanates from local sports sentiment. We measure sports sentiment by the performance of sports teams from the four major professional sports leagues (NFL, MLB, NBA, and NHL) that are based nearby firms’...

We investigate whether and how multinationality affects the opaqueness of the firm. We use multiple alternative measurements of multinationality and opaqueness. Spanning nearly three decades for a large sample of US non-financial firms, we find a statistically and economically significant,...

Drawing from the behavioral theory of the firm and the resource-based view, we argue that different types of R&D (explorative and exploitative) and the timing of R&D investments (pre- and post-acquisitions) have differential effects on post-acquisition performance. By using a sample of 396...