Greater partisan alignment among lawmakers enhances their ability to respond rapidly to adverse shocks, but it also undermines the quality of checks and balances and encourages excessive governmental intervention in local areas aligned with the ruling party. We investigate how this form of local...

IPO firms with high-powered CEO incentive contracts have lower failure rates in the aftermarket. Economically, an interquartile change in the distribution of CEO pay translates in a reduction of the failure risk probability by approximately 21%. The Pay Gap between the CEO and its subordinate...

Using a broad range of uncertainty measures, we show that uncertainty dramatically slows down firms' adjustments toward their optimal capital structure. At the upper bound, the estimated speed of leverage adjustments almost halves when uncertainty is high. High quality institutions (common law...

We study the influence of policy uncertainty on the moral behavior of firms. When facing uncertainty, managers perceive various socioeconomic obstacles as more severe and disruptive to their business. Using data from policy uncertainty spouts in 93 countries, we document that some firms engage...

Career concerns can limit a manager’s willingness to take risks, which can lead to excessive policy conservatism. An increase in a CEO’s ability and willingness to change jobs (CEO mobility) can diversify her human capital and reduce her conservatism. We derive several CEO mobility measures...

This paper offers a novel framework, combining firm operational risk, IPO pricing risk, and market risk, to model IPO failure risk. By analyzing nearly a thousand variables, we observe that prior IPO failure risk models have suffered from a major missing-variable problem. Evidence reveals...