I examine the influence of sell-side financial analysts on corporate social responsibility (CSR) and find that firms with greater analyst coverage tend to be less socially responsible. To establish causality, I employ a difference-in-differences (DiD) technique, using brokerage closures and mergers as exogenous shocks to analyst coverage, as well as an instrumental variables approach. Both identification strategies suggest that analyst coverage has a negative causal effect on CSR. Analyst coverage seems to influence CSR activities via analysts' influence on the value of managerial ownership and discretionary spending. My findings are consistent with the view that spending on CSR is a manifestation of an agency problem and that financial analysts curb such discretionary spending by disciplining managers.

Using a large sample of US public companies, we find robust evidence that firms' payout policies, i.e., dividends and share repurchases, are significantly influenced by the policies of their industry peers. To overcome endogeneity problems, we employ instrumental variable techniques based on peers' stock price shocks. Peer influence on payouts is more pronounced among firms that face greater product market competition and operate in better information environments. With regards to dividends, firms, especially smaller and younger firms, are more sensitive to industry peers that are similar to them in size and age. However, mimicking repurchases is concentrated among large and mature firms only. Peer influence on dividends, compared to repurchases, seems more stable across firm and industry conditions. Overall, peer influence on dividends, and, to a less extent, on repurchases, is consistent with a rivalry-based theory of imitation, which posits that firms imitate peers' actions to maintain their competitive parity.

We find that firms headquartered in areas with a taste for gambling tend to be more innovative, i.e. they spend more on R&D, and obtain more and better quality patents. These results are supported by several robustness checks, tests to mitigate identification concerns, and analyses of several secondary implications. Investment in innovation makes a stock more lottery-like, a feature desired by individuals with a taste for gambling. Gambling preferences of both local investors and managers appear to influence firms' innovative endeavors and facilitate transforming their industry growth opportunities into firm value.

We investigate whether local religiosity matters for risk-taking by banks. Banks headquartered in more religious areas exhibit lower stock return volatility, lower tail risk, and lower idiosyncratic risk. They also tend to be farther away from default as measured by their z-scores. But these banks command lower market valuations during normal times. These results stand up to several robustness checks, tests for mitigating endogeneity concerns, and are supported by an analysis of bank CEOs' religiosity. Moreover, banks in more religious areas remain less vulnerable to crises. To reduce risk, these banks grow their assets more slowly, hold safer assets, rely less on non-traditional banking, and provide less incentives to their executives to increase risks. Local religiosity has a more pronounced influence on risk-taking by banks for which local investors and managers are more important. Overall, this paper contributes to the literature by uncovering an important and previously unidentified determinant of risk-taking by banks, namely, religion-induced risk aversion.

We study the impact of shareholder-initiated litigation risk on a firm's stock price crash risk. Our empirical analysis takes advantage of the staggered adoption of universal demand laws, which led to an exogenous decline in derivative litigation risk. We find that a decline in the threat of derivative litigation reduces crash risk and that information hoarding associated with earnings management is a channel through which litigation risk affects crash risk. The relationship is also moderated by how exposed firms are to the other primary form of shareholder litigation, namely securities class-action lawsuits.