Financial distress is a prevalent issue among the youth. An influential stream of literature has argued that religion wields significant influence over human life. Using a representative sample of U.S. young people, we explore whether religiosity matters for financial distress. To deal with endogeneity issue, we exploit arguably exogeneous within-school variation in adolescents’ peers. By instrumenting an adolescent's own religiosity with the religiosity of their school peer group, we find that higher levels of religiosity causally and significantly reduce the likelihood of financial distress at young adulthood. Our results withstand a variety of robustness checks. To shed light on the mechanisms, we explore the impact of religiosity on an individual's sociability and various psychological attributes. We find that more religious individuals hold higher levels of self-control, a crucial attribute that aids in averting financial distress. Our study contributes to the literature by providing rigorous causal evidence that identifies religiosity as a meaningful predictor of reduced financial distress among young adults.

Using a corporate culture measure based on the textual analysis of the Q&A section of earnings conference calls, we document robust evidence that similar corporate cultural values between supply chain partners improve the financial performance of suppliers. Consistent with the view that supplier–customer cultural similarity facilitates communication, promotes altruistic attitudes, and builds trust between trading partners, we find that culturally similar suppliers experience higher cost efficiency, fewer problems with underinvestment, and better innovation performance. Our results also indicate that cultural similarity benefits customers, although to a lesser extent. Overall, our study sheds new light on how inter-firm cultural similarity influences firm performance along the supply chain.

We use common factor analysis on seven individual management quality measures to extract a management quality factor and examine its relationship with corporate social performance. Using managers’ draft risk during the Vietnam War as an instrumental variable for management quality, we find that firms with higher-quality managers score better in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). The cross-sectional results suggest that high-quality managers strategically invest in CSR when potential benefits outweigh the costs. Specifically, the positive relationship between management quality and CSR is more pronounced for firms under fierce product market competition when CSR is crucial for differentiating the firm from its competitors. Moreover, CSR becomes more sensitive to management quality when customer awareness and investor attention are high, increasing the likelihood that CSR enhances customer perception and investor trust. Finally, we find that CSR investment by high-quality managers creates more shareholder value, suggesting that higher-quality managers are more capable of “doing well by doing good.”