We introduce a novel measure of CEO depression by applying machine learning models that analyze vocal acoustic features from CEOs' conference call recordings. Our research was preregistered via the Journal of Accounting Research 's registration‐based editorial process. In this study, we validate this measure and examine associated factors. We find that greater firm risk is positively associated with CEO depression, whereas higher job demands are negatively associated with CEO depression. Female and older CEOs show a lower likelihood of depression. Using this novel measure, we then explore the relationship between CEO depression and career outcomes. Although we do not find any evidence that CEO depression is associated with CEO turnover, we find some evidence that turnover‐performance sensitivity is higher among depressed CEOs. We also find limited evidence of higher compensation and higher pay‐performance sensitivity for depressed CEOs. This study provides new insights into the relationship between CEO mental health and career outcomes.

Using consumer complaints filed with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as a measure for the quality of financial products and services, we present evidence of racial disparities in the service quality received by consumers. Consumers in high‐minority communities file more complaints than those in low‐minority communities, and the racial gap in financial complaints increased by more than 60% during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Using a triple‐difference approach, we establish the role of corporate social attitudes, reflected in, for example, inclusive promotion practices and diversity in leadership, in mitigating the complaint racial gap and its pandemic‐period increase. Our results shed light on how inclusive corporate culture filters through an organization to benefit minority communities and underscore the effect of corporate social attitudes on important stakeholder outcomes.

Capital flows increase in response to new public information. Conventional explanations typically conclude that this reflects a rational response to reduced risk. However, investors may also be overconfident in their ability to benefit from new information, even when it is publicly available and does not provide a relative advantage. We exploit two complementary settings to examine how this “better‐than‐average” mechanism affects capital flows. Archival evidence from horse race betting markets shows capital flows increase following the public provision of a summary measure of horse performance, even though more total parimutuel wagering necessarily implies a greater wealth transfer from bettors to tracks. A controlled lab experiment provides direct causal evidence of our proposed mechanism. Combined, our results suggest that new public information can increase capital flows due to investors’ overconfidence in their ability to benefit from information relative to others. Our findings inform regulators seeking to understand the consequences of expanding the public information available to individual investors.

We investigate the effects of a qualitative tax disclosure mandate aimed at improving tax transparency and compliance by imposing reputational costs for firms. We use, as an exogenous shock, the 2016 UK reform that required large businesses to disclose their tax strategy. We find that treated firms—those that must publish a tax strategy report—also significantly increase the volume of tax strategy disclosure in their annual reports, but this disclosure contains more boilerplate. The standalone tax strategy reports contain narratives similar to those in the annual reports, are sticky, and their quality is correlated with those of disclosures on gender and human rights. Turning to real behavioral changes, we document no significant effect on tax planning across several proxies and firm characteristics. While we find that the mandate increased media attention on treated firms, our results suggest that this enforcement channel might not work in the context of qualitative disclosure, which may be hard to verify for outside stakeholders. Even in subsamples of firms for which we would expect higher reputational costs, we document similar responses. Taken together, our findings indicate that mandating qualitative tax disclosure has incentivized firms to portray themselves as good tax citizens without changing their practices.

We examine whether the local administration of sales taxes (as opposed to a more streamlined state administration) affects the real economy for businesses complying with the tax. We study this question in the Florida hotel industry, as counties in Florida can choose to locally administer the county‐level tourist tax or have the state administer the county‐level tax along with the state‐level tourist tax. Local administration is popular because it supports local employment (of tax administrators) and provides more stringent enforcement on non‐commercial operators (e.g., private rentals). State administration, however, has fewer compliance costs for hotels (e.g., reduced filings and fewer audits). Commentary from the profession suggests the incremental compliance costs of local administration can be considerable. We find that counties switching from state to local administration of tourist taxes is associated with slower growth in aggregate hotel payroll and employment, consistent with local tax administration increasing compliance costs to the point that affected businesses cut other services.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development introduced country‐by‐country reporting (CbCR) for multinational enterprises (MNEs) to help tax authorities combat tax‐motivated income shifting. This study uses confidential U.S. tax administrative data from 2011 to 2018 to examine the effect of U.S. CbCR adoption on the tax‐motivated income shifting and real activities of U.S. MNEs. We first document that while U.S. CbCR provides the Internal Revenue Service with incremental information about the location of U.S. MNEs’ global activities relative to existing U.S. tax return disclosures, substantial overlap exists between U.S. CbCR and existing disclosures. In contrast with prior CbCR studies in cross‐country settings, we fail to find evidence of a change in U.S. MNEs’ tax‐motivated income shifting or a reallocation of real activities based on tax incentives in response to U.S. CbCR using multiple empirical approaches. Overall, our study leverages U.S. tax administrative data to provide insights into the impact of the CbCR initiative on U.S. MNEs.