We examine the relation between a measure of male CEOs’ facial masculinity and financial misreporting. Facial masculinity is associated with a complex of masculine behaviors (including aggression, egocentrism, riskseeking, and maintenance of social status) in males . One possible mechanism for this relation is that the hormone testosterone influences both behavior and the development of the face shape. We document a positive association between CEO facial masculinity and various misreporting proxies in a broad sample of S&P1500 firms during 1996–2010. We complement this evidence by documenting that a CEO's facial masculinity predicts his firm's likelihood of being subject to an SEC enforcement action. We also show that an executive's facial masculinity is associated with the likelihood of the SEC naming him as a perpetrator. We find that facial masculinity is not a measure of overconfidence. Finally, we demonstrate that facial masculinity also predicts the incidence of insider trading and option backdating.

We investigate two determinants of two choices in the control system of divisionalized firms, namely decentralization and use of performance measures. The two determinants are those identified in the literature as important to control system design: (1) information asymmetries between corporate and divisional managers and (2) division interdependencies. We treat decentralization and performance measurement choices as endogenous variables and examine the interrelation among these choices using a simultaneous equation model. Using data from 78 divisions, our results indicate that decentralization is positively related to the level of information asymmetries and negatively to intrafirm interdependencies, while the use of performance measures is affected by the level of interdependencies among divisions within the firm, but not by information asymmetries. We find some evidence that decentralization choice and use of performance measures are complementary.

We take advantage of a new composite measure of political risk (Hassan et al., 2019) to study the effects of firm-level political risk on private debt markets. First, we use panel data tests and exploit the redrawing of US congressional districts to uncover plausibly exogenous variation in firm-level political risk. We show that borrowers’ political risk is linked to interest rates set by lenders. Second, we test for the transmission of political risk from lenders to borrowers. We predict and find that lender-level political risk propagates to borrowers through lending relationships. Our analysis allows for endogenous matching between lenders and borrowers and indicates the presence of network effects in diffusing political risk throughout the economy. Finally, we introduce new text-based methods to analyze the distinct sources of political risk to lenders and borrowers and provide textual evidence of the transmission of political risk from lenders to borrowers.

We construct text-based measures of the primary concerns listed firms associated with the spread of COVID-19 and other epidemic diseases. We identify which firms perceive to lose or gain from a given epidemic and textually decompose the epidemic’s effect on the firm’s demand and supply. We find that the effects of COVID-19 manifest as a simultaneous shock to demand and supply, with both shocks affecting firms’ market valuations in equal measure on average. By contrast, demand-related impacts appear more important in accounting for the observed collapse in firm-level investment during the COVID-19 crisis.

Why do seemingly similar firms show such different productivity? We argue that unresolved measurement problems, i.e., the persistent incongruity between economic transactions and their accounting representation, affect resource allocation. Our metric quantifies technical accounting terminology in firm disclosures to capture these unresolved measurement problems, UMPs, using over 90,000 10-Ks. A one standard deviation increase in UMP is associated with lower capital investment (6 percent), R&D (5 percent), and hiring growth (30 percent). We also find a reduction in total factor productivity (5 percent) and Tobin’s q (4 percent). Further, CEO compensation sensitivity to accounting performance decreases with UMP, whereas stock-based sensitivity remains unaffected. Our inferences continue to hold when we use a Bartik instrument, which exploits differential exposure to GAAP changes to isolate accounting-driven variation from the firm’s underlying economics. The results suggest unresolved measurement problems are a significant friction in resource allocation. Data Availability: The UMP dataset is available upon request. Please contact the first author.