We find widespread evidence that firms avoid overtime payments by strategically assigning “managerial” titles. Exploiting the exemption threshold under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), we find managerial titles increase almost fivefold just above the overtime pay cutoff, including suspect listings, such as “Director of First Impressions” for a role equivalent to “Front-Desk Clerk.” Avoidance is higher when firms have more bargaining power and are financially constrained. It is also more common in occupations with volatile demand and unpredictable worker scheduling. Patterns align with litigation and Department of Labor enforcement. Firms avoid roughly 13.5% in compensation costs, hiring strategic “managers.”

While corporate social responsibility by firms aims at improving welfare for different social groups, whether it achieves this is often difficult to measure. After Apr. 2018 protests, Starbucks enacted policies that anybody could sit in their stores and use the bathroom without making a purchase. Using anonymized cellphone location data, we estimate this led to a 7.0% decline in attendance relative to other nearby coffee shops. The effect is 84% larger near homeless shelters and larger for Starbucks’ wealthier customers. The average time spent per visit declined by 4.1%. Public urination citations decreased near Starbucks locations, but other minor crimes were unchanged.

We investigate whether restatements announced by economically related firms influence the contract terms a borrower receives from lenders. A restatement by a major customer firm increases the loan spread of a borrower by 11 basis points, on average. The contagion effects of customer restatements are higher (45 basis points) when a borrower's switching costs are high. Restatements by peer firms in the same industry also increase a borrower's loan spread, and this increase occurs regardless of restatement severity. Moreover, the sensitivity of loan spread to peer restatements is significantly greater when the restating peer firms are also in the bank's lending portfolio, suggesting that a lender's personal experience with restatements in an industry makes it more attuned to the potential implications of these restatements for the borrowing firm. Finally, our results suggest that lenders utilize information from peer restatements to anticipate future restatements by the borrowing firm.

This analysis identifies a distinct immediate announcement period negative relation between earnings announcement surprises and aggregate market returns. Such a relation implies that market participants use earnings information in forming expectations about expected aggregate discount rates and, specifically, that good earnings news is associated with a positive shock to required returns. Consistent with this interpretation we find that Treasury bond rates and implied future inflation expectations respond directly to earnings news. We also find some evidence that the negative relation between earnings news and market return persists beyond the immediate announcement period, suggesting that market participants do not immediately fully impound these future market return implications of aggregate earnings news.

Mutual funds whose managers are in the same educational network as the firm's CEO are more likely to vote against shareholder-initiated proposals to limit executive compensation than out-of-network funds are. This voting propensity is stronger when voting among the funds in a family is not unanimous. Furthermore, CEOs of firms who have relatively high levels of educationally connected mutual fund ownership have higher levels of compensation than their unconnected counterparts. This aspect of executive compensation is related to both the abnormal trading performance of the connected investors in the firm and the perceived quality of firm management by the connected investors.

We investigate how households adjust their shopping behavior in response to financial shocks. Our results show that households visit stores more frequently but buy fewer products and spend less in financial downturns. When money is tight, they switch to cheaper products, use more coupons, and reduce bulk purchases. During financially stressful times, households shrink the set of stores that they visit, mainly by discarding high-end stores, and varying the stores within the same set. Our store-level analysis shows that heightened financial stress in the area is associated with a decline in sales of all products, but much less so for cheaper products. Our results underscore the pivotal role of product markets in facilitating consumption smoothing.

We investigate the importance of client relationships in the financial advisory industry. We exploit firm-level variation in adoption of the Broker Protocol, which enabled clients to follow their advisers to member firms without fear of litigation. We show that advisers’ ability to maintain client relationships is a significant predictor of their employment decisions; that about 40% of client assets follow advisers when they move; and that once clients are “unlocked,” firms become less willing to fire advisers for misconduct. Firms that unlock their clients subsequently experience higher levels of misconduct and increase their fees, calling into question whether clients are better off.

We study the importance of trust in the investment advisory industry by exploiting the geographic dispersion of victims of the Madoff Ponzi scheme. Residents of communities that were exposed to the fraud subsequently withdrew assets from investment advisers and increased deposits at banks. Additionally, exposed advisers were more likely to close. Advisers who provided services that can build trust, such as financial planning advice, experienced fewer withdrawals. Our evidence suggests that the trust shock was transmitted through social networks. Taken together, our results show that trust plays a critical role in the financial intermediation industry. Received April 18, 2016; editorial decision March 8, 2017 by Editor Robin Greenwood.

When local media report news about local companies, they use fewer negative words compared to the same media reporting about nonlocal companies. We document that one reason for this positive slant is the firms' local media advertising expenditures. Abnormal positive local media slant strongly relates to firm equity values. The effect is stronger for small firms; firms held predominantly by individual investors; and firms with illiquid or highly volatile stock, low analyst following, or high dispersion of analyst forecasts. These findings show that news content varies systematically with the characteristics and conflicts of interest of the source.