The economic links between firms created by customer and supplier relationships are critical determinants of those firms' values and actions. We demonstrate that significant trade relationships and indirect economic links incrementally explain which firms are more likely to be involved in...

A common view in the literature is that the director labor market provides an ex post settling-up for past decisions by rewarding CEO ability and actions that are consistent with shareholder interests. In this paper we focus on large CEO acquisition decisions to investigate whether the director...

We examine the rewards for experience and ability in the director labor market. We show that large acquisitions are associated with significantly higher numbers of subsequent board seats for the acquiring CEO, target CEO, and the directors. We also find that, in the case of acquisitions,...

The value a director provides to a firm is empirically hard to establish. We estimate that value by exploiting the commonality in idiosyncratic returns of firms linked by a director and show that, on average, a single director's influence causes variation in firm value of almost 1% per year. The...

We explore three ways to classify mutual funds as ESG-oriented: by their names, their voting records, and their holdings. ESG-named funds and ESG-voting funds tend to be smaller than non-ESG funds, and spread their investment over more individual companies. They never control more than a quarter...

We assess whether a VC’s intrinsic commitment to a startup affects investment performance. We proxy for climate change commitment using the political contributions to democrats of the lead VC person on a deal. We find investments by democrats in climate-related startups have 8% higher...