We examine the effects of time-limited disclosure relief under the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act of 2012. The Act grants newly public firms up to five years of exemptions, and our results suggest that the fixed duration of this relief, as much as its availability, shapes post-IPO behavior. Using an intention-to-treat design, we compare treated firms with smaller reporting companies whose exemptions are similar but carry no fixed expiry date. Equity issuance by treated firms increases significantly as the deadline nears while debt issuance declines, and cash reserves accumulate over the period. Capital expenditure increases relative to controls in the early post-IPO years, while R&D shows no differential response. As expiry approaches, the differential with the control group in internal investment weakens but cash-financed acquisitions accelerate. This shift in investment composition coincides with deteriorating operating performance and declining market valuations relative to IPO levels. Our post-expiry analysis reveals an abrupt reversal in acquisition activity upon transition to full disclosure while internal investment remains unchanged, supporting the argument that pre-expiry behavior was driven by the regulatory timeline rather than natural firm maturation. We conclude that the duration of regulatory relief is as important as its scope in shaping corporate behavior, and that time-limited exemptions from mandatory disclosure can induce anticipatory firm responses that work against the policy's intended objectives.

This article documents adverse selection in Ginnie Mae issuers’ early buyout decisions. Conditional on default, we find a 1 percentage point increase in interest rate spread increases the probability of an early buyout by 7–9 percentage points. Issuers buy out higher interest rate spread loans because they generate greater economic gains when they reperform. We illustrate how issuers acquire private soft information that provides direct insight into the likelihood of reperformance. Although the soft information is ostensibly collected on behalf of investors during the delinquent loan servicing process, issuers can exploit the information in their early buyout decisions.

In many markets, buyers make discrete choices between differentiated products and negotiate prices that are specific to the choice. We develop for estimation a model for this class of markets which is consistent with non-cooperative models of bargaining between a buyer and competing sellers. We show that when the buyer’s utility has GEV disturbances, the model has a tractable likelihood function which can be used with transaction-level data giving the selected product and its price. We estimate the model using data from the UK brick industry and use it to measure market power and analyse mergers. We analyse how spatial differentiation and ownership concentration affect the distribution of market power across transactions. In counterfactuals we find that switching from individually negotiated to uniform pricing causes markups, and merger price effects, to increase on average but to decrease for a minority of transactions.

We construct a public atlas of mean outcomes in adulthood by childhood census tract. Outcomes vary sharply across neighborhoods: For children whose parents earn $27,000, the standard deviation of mean household income in adulthood is $10,420 across tracts within counties. Only half the variation in outcomes is explained by traditional measures of neighborhood opportunity like poverty rates. Experimental and quasi-experimental estimates indicate 60 percent of the variation in outcomes across neighborhoods is driven by causal effects. We demonstrate how our statistics can be applied to better target policies to improve low-opportunity areas and help families move to affordable high-opportunity areas.