Firms strategically choose more conservative capital structures when they face greater competitive threats stemming from the potential loss of their trade secrets to rivals. Following the recognition of the Inevitable Disclosure Doctrine by US state courts, which exogenously increases the protection of a firm's trade secrets by reducing the mobility of its workers who know its secrets to rivals, the firm increases its leverage relative to unaffected rivals. The effect is stronger for firms with a greater risk of losing key employees to rivals, for those facing financially stronger rivals, and for those in industries where competition is more intense.

We examine whether location within a dense regional cluster of interconnected businesses affected firm performance during the Great Recession and the subsequent recovery. Firms in denser regional clusters experienced faster sales growth than their rivals in less dense clusters, especially firms operating in more competitive industries and those more able to reap agglomeration benefits. They also faced lower uncertainty, invested more in both physical capital and intangible capital, and maintained higher employment growth. Their greater resiliency and agility led to significant increases in their valuations. These results suggest that regional clusters provide competitive advantages during turbulent times.

Events that disrupt customer–supplier relationships pose a source of risk for suppliers that depend on a customer for a large portion of their revenues. We identify the replacement of a customer’s chief executive officer (CEO) as a disruptive event that results in suppliers losing substantial sales. These losses are greater when an incumbent customer CEO is more likely to be entrenched and stem largely from the successor divesting assets. Finally, we document that losses in sales following a customer CEO turnover lead to declines in a supplier’s financial performance and that suppliers experience negative abnormal stock returns to announcements of customer CEO departures.

We exploit the adoption of U.S. state-level labor protection laws to study the effect of employment protection on corporate investment rates and sales growth. We find that, following the adoption of these laws, capital expenditures as a percentage of book assets decrease, resulting in slower sales growth. Our findings are consistent with theories predicting that greater employment protection discourages investment by making projects more irreversible. Supporting this channel, following negative cash flow shocks, firms are less likely to downsize operations in states that have adopted these laws but more likely to downsize in states that have not adopted these laws.

Based on a comprehensive data set of classified (staggered) boards covering nearly all U.S. public firms from 1991 to 2020, we show that contrary to conventional wisdom, the use of classified boards remains widespread. Moreover, classified board usage over a firm's life cycle depends significantly on the decade the firm matured or year it went public. While classified boards were rarely removed in the 1990s, firms became more likely to declassify as they matured during the following decades. Decreased collective action costs and increased innovation‐related investments, institutional ownership, and scrutiny of governance contributed to this more dynamic adjustment.