Knowledge that Transforms

An asset owner designs an asset-backed security and a signal about its value. After experiencing a liquidity shock and privately observing the signal, he sells the security to imperfectly competitive buyers. With flexible information design, the security’s informational sensitivity is a blessing, not a curse. Among double-monotone securities, the issuer prefers to sell the asset in combination with an appropriate signal rather than design more complex securities. Within the class of monotone securities, live-or-die securities are optimal and strictly dominate asset sales. When signals are restricted to be sufficiently informative about the upside, debt and additional-tier-1 debt become optimal.

Mortgage fraud was a leading force behind the 2008 financial crisis. We measure the fraudulent income overstatement at the bank-ZIP Code-year level as the difference in the local growth between reported income in mortgage applications and the income based on IRS data. We find that overstated income is positively associated with banks’ internal control weaknesses over financial reporting and negatively associated with subsequent remediation of such weaknesses. The associations are concentrated among banks that integrate their accounting and operation processes, as proxied by the adoption of an Enterprise Resource Planning system. Finally, using the removal of internal control provisions in the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Improvement Act in 2005 as a shock to internal control quality, we find that affected banks experience increased income overstatement on mortgage applications. Data Availability: Data used in this study are available from the public and proprietary sources identified in the article. Access to proprietary data is subject to the relevant providers’ licensing restrictions.

This study examines how tenured BAF experience and navigate institutional structures while advancing their careers. Leveraging a qualitative approach, we find BAF encounter recurring forms of marginalization embedded in organizational structures that lead to social identity threats that destabilize their identities as scholars and teachers. BAF respond to these threats by employing agentic and self-preserving coping responses designed to affirm identity and negotiate career advancement. Although coping responses can be effective on an individual level, they do not transform institutional structures and can provoke pushback that reinscribes marginalization. The findings unsettle common assumptions that effort in conditions marked by objectivity and neutrality drives career advancement and highlight the institutional structures and invisible labor that BAF navigate to achieve career advancement. We fill the void in the literature examining how career advancement unfolds within racialized conditions of academic institutions and advance research on minoritized group status in accounting academia.

Firms typically design incentive systems to motivate employees and advance firm objectives, including productivity (i.e., maximizing output) and efficiency (i.e., minimizing input). However, there remains little empirical research on the potential psychological effects of adopting a productivity versus efficiency focus on employee risk perceptions and decision-making. To address this important gap, we examine how these different incentive foci affect employee target setting under participative budgets. We predict and find that employees perceive efficiency incentives as riskier than productivity incentives, leading to lower target setting. Moreover, consistent with our theory, this effect disappears in the absence of outcome uncertainty. We also find employees are less likely to achieve their target and have higher error rates under efficiency incentives, despite setting easier targets. Overall, our findings suggest that efficiency incentives, relative to productivity incentives, can have detrimental effects on target setting and subsequent performance in participative budgeting settings. Data Availability: Contact the authors.

People’s right to free speech can have profound effects on how firms discharge their social and environmental responsibilities. We examine these effects by analyzing the impact of the staggered enactment of anti-SLAPP free speech laws across U.S. states on firms’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) behavior. We theorize that, following the enactment of anti-SLAPP laws, firms enhance their CSR activities as an economically effective means to counter negative publicity from stakeholders. Supporting this idea, we find that firm CSR activity increases after the enactment of anti-SLAPP laws, accompanied by an increase in stakeholder criticism of firms’ social and environmental practices. Further, we observe an increase in the level of CSR disclosure. The link between anti-SLAPP law enactment and subsequent CSR engagement is stronger in states with more comprehensive anti-SLAPP protections than in those with weaker protections. Data Availability: From public sources identified in the study. Some may require a subscription.

Organizational learning (OL) is a critical organizational capability. Yet designing management control (MC) that effectively supports OL is challenging, as learning outcomes are often intangible and unfold over extended time horizons. Employing situational strength theory, we examine combinations of MC practices that affect OL contingent on environmental uncertainty. Drawing on a survey of 210 senior business unit controllers, we use fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) to identify multiple combinations of MC practices that achieve high OL in different uncertainty contexts. In a subsequent step, we examine whether the situational strength of certain combinations of MC practices is associated with OL. Results show that in a low-uncertainty environment, the combined use of diverse performance measures and social controls, as well as performance pay and a mechanistic administrative structure, have a synergetic effect on OL. In a high-uncertainty context, the combined use of measure diversity and deliberate formal strategic planning is beneficial for achieving OL. Our results suggest that the effectiveness of MC practices for OL depends on aligning MC practices with the internal as well as the external context.

We collect 2,848 instrumental variable (IV) regressions from 391 papers published in top economics and finance journals and show that estimated IV coefficients are often much larger than their OLS counterparts, even when theory suggests they should be smaller. We derive meta-regression estimators that distinguish measurement error bias from omitted variable bias and simultaneity bias; applying our estimators to a set of 1,040 comparable regressions from 139 papers, we find that measurement error shrinks reported coefficients by about two to four times. Measurement error remains quantitatively important even after accounting for weak instruments, publication bias, instrument invalidity, and heterogeneous treatment effects. Our results suggest that measurement error is a severe, pervasive, and understated source of bias in economics and finance.