In the feld of empirical asset pricing, the challenges of high dimensionality, non-linear relationships, and interaction efects have led to the increasing popularity of machine learning (ML) methods. This study investigates the performance of ML methods when predicting diferent measures of stock...

We find that newspapers connected to firms through common business group affiliation display a more positive reporting tone than unconnected newspapers. This result is robust to both a DiD approach and controlling for newspaper-firm pair fixed effects. Further, the association between connected...

Innovation is a contract intensive economic activity in a world of incomplete contracts. We show that trust mitigates incomplete contracting and enhances innovation by acting as an informal contracting mechanism. Trust plays an especially important role when formal laws and regulations are...