Aghion, Van Reenen and Zingales (2013) find that institutional ownership causes an increase in innovation as measured by citation-weighted patent counts. To identify a causal effect, they use membership in the S&P 500 as an instrument for institutional ownership in a panel regression. We first...

Using natural language processing, we identify corporate goals stated in the shareholder letters of the 150 largest companies in the United States from 1955 to 2020. Corporate goals have proliferated, from less than one on average in 1955 to more than 7 in 2020. While in 1955, profit...

Using natural language processing, we identify and categorize the corporate goals in the shareholder letters of the 150 largest companies in the United States, from 1955 to 2020. Corporate goals have proliferated during this period from an average of two in 1955 to almost 10 in 2020. We find a...

We study the impact of digital banking on the value of the deposit franchise and the stability of the banking sector. Using the classification of digital banking in Koont (2023), we find that when the Fed funds rate increases, deposits flow out faster, and the cost of deposits increases more in...

In the last few years, there has been a dramatic increase in shareholder engagement on environmental and social issues. In some cases shareholders are pushing companies to take actions that may reduce market value. It is hard to understand this behavior using the dominant corporate governance...

Italy's aggregate productivity abruptly stopped growing in the mid-1990s. This stop represents a puzzle, as it occurred at a time of stable macroeconomic conditions. In this paper, we investigate the possible causes of this “disease” by using sector and firm-level data. We find that Italy's...

Do partial steps toward European integration generate support for further steps or do they create a political backlash? We try to answer this question by analyzing the cross sectional and time series variation in pro-European sentiments in the EU 15 countries. The two major steps forward (the...