We study the impact of an online market’s policy (environmental policy) offering entrepreneurs the option to disclose their environmental engagement on entrepreneurship outcomes, using Kickstarter as a laboratory. Following the policy’s implementation, 32.4% of entrepreneurs opted to disclose their environmental commitments. Using the passage of the environmental policy as an instrument, we show that environmental commitment improves funding outcomes, with the funding success rate increasing by 13.2% and the pledged funding ratio by 8.7%. Environmental commitment also attracts more environmentally conscious backers and brings in new backers, which likely contributes to these improved outcomes. However, environmental commitment does not have a material impact on the ultimate project success rate and significantly delays project delivery. Overall, the evidence suggests that Kickstarter’s nudge policy encourages entrepreneurs’ environmental engagement and helps them expand access to environmentally conscious backers by internalizing backers’ environmental preferences.

Using the near universe of online job postings from 2007 to 2021, we construct a firm-level metric of labor market power. We find that firms with higher labor market power tend to have higher financial leverage. Our findings are not driven by product market competition or correlated labor market characteristics. The evidence is less pronounced among firms hiring in occupations with high labor mobility and skill transferability. To establish causality, we exploit the establishment of Amazon HQ2 in Crystal City as a shock to the labor market power of local firms and show consistent findings with our baseline results.

We study how mutual fund managers gain an edge in selecting stocks in an era of globalization. We use textual analysis to construct a measure that captures a mutual fund's offshore exposure concentration through holding US multinational firms. We find that funds with a higher offshore concentration index (OCI) perform significantly better, with the difference in four-factor alpha between the top and bottom deciles amounting to 2.95% per annum. Fund managers’ overweighting of firms with operations in certain countries can be partly attributed to their foreign ethnicity. High OCI fund managers have an information advantage regarding firms’ fundamentals, such as earnings.

Many US states have a single cutoff date for school entry, meaning that some children are older than others when they begin kindergarten. We show that this variation in birth months is associated with differences in adult labor market outcomes in the mutual fund industry. Relatively older managers (i.e., those born just after the cutoff) make better stock selections, and their funds outperform their younger peers’ funds by 0.48% per annum. This difference is linked to increased confidence. Survey respondents judge relatively older managers as appearing more confident in photographs, and these managers display more confident behavior: making larger bets, window dressing their holdings less, and securing more fund flows conditional on performance.