CEOs with substantial general managerial ability (generalist CEOs) possess a substantial share of organization (human) capital and have different risk-taking incentives than do their counterpart specialist CEOs. Using an index increasing in CEO general managerial skills as a proxy for general managerial ability, we find that investors require higher returns from firms featuring CEOs who have profuse general managerial ability. Furthermore, expected returns are significantly increasing with CEO general managerial ability in firms with high organization capital, that belong to M&A-intensive industries and that have complex operations, high agency problems and high anti-takeover provisions. These findings are consistent with arguments that organization (human) capital has significant expected return implications and that CEOs with higher general managerial skills may lead to higher agency problems, feature different risk-taking incentives and be more costly to retain in times of need.

CEOs’ option-based compensation and discussions about political risk (risk-talking) in successive earnings conference calls are significantly positively associated. This effect is more significant in the subsample of firms with less equity price volatility and poor investment risk-taking (lower capital expenditure). Furthermore, seven out of eight components of risk-talking are positively related to CEOs’ option-based compensation. These findings suggest that CEOs with more options in compensation packages are likely to find discussing political risk during corporate earnings calls as a viable alternative to boost proxies of risk-taking outcomes (such as equity price volatility), especially when they perceive risk-taking expectations to be untenable.

Studies in social sciences suggest that a normative commitment to stable, biological married life is a potent catalyst for inculcating and nourishing prosocial values, preferences and behaviors among family members. Extrapolating from this literature, we investigate whether firms led by married chief executive officers (CEOs) are associated with better corporate social responsibility (CSR). Our analysis of 2163 U.S. public corporations from 1993 to 2008 shows that firms led by married CEOs are associated with significantly higher scores on a popular CSR index, after controlling for a wide range of firm characteristics and CEO attributes. Further, the observed positive relation is particularly sharper with the diversity and employee relations components of CSR. Our findings highlight CEO marital status as an important driver of socially responsible corporate decision making.

Patented knowledge capital improves the transparency of research and development expenditures, converts intangible intellectual property into collateralizable and salable assets, enhances sustained competitive advantage by enabling firms to weather business cycles, withstand obsolescence risk and competitive threats, and lowers future financing risk and growth uncertainties. Consistent with this conjecture, we find that knowledge capital, proxied by stocks of patents, their forward citations and estimated market value, is associated with lower future cost of equity as well as firm risk. These findings appear robust to controlling for the stock of R&D expenses, potential endogeneity concerns about firms’ innovative activities, controls for technology spillovers from industry rivals, and product market competition.

In a sample of U.S. firms, we find strong evidence that firms' implied cost of equity is decreasing in a novel proxy of firm-level climate change sentiments of earnings call participants, supporting prior literature that shows investors demand higher returns from their investments in brown firms and lower returns from that in green firms. This effect, however, is particularly pronounced for the firm-years headquartered in the states experiencing higher than median per-capita energy related CO2 emissions, those headquartered in climate related disaster intensive counties and those headquartered in RED and SWING states, supporting “boomerang hypothesis” that green firms are hedged against potential changes in local climate standards and thus enjoy considerably cheaper financing in the localities marred with greenhouse gas emission concerns, climate related physical disasters, and climate unfriendly political environment. We utilize the variation in regionwide and statewide public beliefs about scientists' beliefs regarding the occurrence of global warming as an instrument to address endogeneity issues, among other tests.

We examine the effect of corporate social responsibility (CSR) on the cost of equity capital for a large sample of US firms. Using several approaches to estimate firms’ ex ante cost of equity, we find that firms with better CSR scores exhibit cheaper equity financing. In particular, our findings suggest that investment in improving responsible employee relations, environmental policies, and product strategies contributes substantially to reducing firms’ cost of equity. Our results also show that participation in two “sin” industries, namely, tobacco and nuclear power, increases firms’ cost of equity. These findings support arguments in the literature that firms with socially responsible practices have higher valuation and lower risk.