This paper examines the effects of high school curriculum reforms on infant health by exploiting sharp and staggered changes across states in core course requirements for graduation. Our results suggest that curriculum reforms significantly reduced the incidence of low birthweight and prematurity for black mothers. For white mothers, the estimated effects are small and generally insignificant. We also explore the mechanisms for observed effects and provide evidence consistent with our explanations. Finally, we calculate a large social gain induced by favorable infant health outcomes. Several robustness checks and different placebo tests support our findings.

We document a positive effect of product market competition (PMC) on venture capital (VC) staging. Employing large tariff rate reductions as an exogenous shock to PMC, we find that large tariff reductions lead to a greater likelihood of staged financing and a larger number of financing rounds. Cross-sectional analyses reveal that the effect is stronger for entrepreneurial firms that are younger, operate in high-tech and manufacturing industries, or receive investments from less reputable and inexperienced VCs. Our findings are consistent with the notion that by mitigating business uncertainty and survival risk, VC staging acts as a complement to PMC for enhancing entrepreneurial firms’ success.

We find that U.S. corporations increase their cash holdings in response to higher economic policy uncertainty. The increase in cash holdings is not attributed to a reduction in firm investments. This increase is more pronounced for financially constrained firms or those with larger exposure to policy uncertainty. Holding more cash in the presence of policy uncertainty alleviates the negative impact of policy uncertainty on capital investment and firm innovation outputs. Our findings demonstrate that cash holdings represent an important channel in mitigating the negative effect of policy uncertainty on firm real economic activities.

This study examines how the geographical structure of social networks shapes venture capital (VC) investment decisions. We find that VC firms invest more in portfolio companies in socially connected regions. The effect is more pronounced among independent, smaller, less reputable, early–stage–focused VC firms and those not from a VC hub. We further document that social connectedness lowers the likelihood of a successful exit since it induces VC firms to undertake suboptimal investment decisions. Overall, our findings highlight the role of social connectedness in constituting the geographical differences in VC firms’ capital allocation and investment outcomes.