We study the determinants of firms’ LGBTQ+ policies and their relation to general CSR policies. Common factors explain LGBTQ+ policies related to firms’ primary stakeholders and those aimed at public LGBTQ+ efforts: younger firms, those with more financial resources, more educated workforces, catering to retail customers, and located in liberal areas have more LGBTQ+-friendly policies. LGBTQ+ initiatives encounter less societal agreement than CSR initiatives. Illustrating the distinctiveness of LGBTQ+ issues in the CSR space, we find that firms’ LGBTQ+ friendliness only weakly correlates with overall CSR performance. Lastly, we show that firms’ LGBTQ+ policies respond to pressure from shareholder proposals.

Credit ratings of corporations are biased, but the forces driving this bias are unclear. We argue it would be difficult for rating agencies to issue high grades for a firm’s debt when there are a lot of objective equity analyst reports about the firm’s earnings that are informative about its default. We find that an exogenous drop in analyst coverage leads to greater optimism-bias in ratings, especially for firms with little bond analyst coverage and those that are close to default. This coverage-induced shock leads to less informative ratings about future defaults and downgrades and more subsequent bond security mispricings.

Using a novel dataset, I show that hedge fund managers connected through shared employment histories hold and trade more of the same stocks than unconnected managers. A long-short portfolio of connected-unconnected overlapped trades generates 3.6% of annual alpha. Results are greater between fund-pairs with stronger social connections and longer relationships implying a socially reinforcing channel is responsible. Shock based tests confirm social channels lead to the main findings, supporting models of manager coordination. The findings identify common sources of risk and return for employment-linked hedge funds, except during severe drawdowns when common holdings are protected from fire sales.

We study competition for startups among VCs with heterogeneous skill. VCs with established skill face two impediments. First, less established VCs compete aggressively for new startups in order to establish a reputation. Second, startups also value reliability in their VCs, which imposes a higher cost on established VCs because they have better outside options. As a result, startups “over-experiment” by excessively partnering with less established VCs, which crowds out established skill and reduces social welfare. Established VCs are hurt because they need to pay more to attract startups, lose profitable opportunities, and face increased competition from newly established VCs.

The return expectations of public pension funds are positively related to cross-sectional differences in past performance. This positive relation operates through the expected risk premium, rather than the expected risk-free rate or inflation rate. Pension funds act on their beliefs and adjust their portfolio composition accordingly. Persistent investment skills, risk taking, efforts to reduce costly rebalancing, and fiscal incentives from unfunded liabilities cannot fully explain the reliance of expectations on past performance. The results are consistent with extrapolative expectations, since the dependence on past returns is greater when executives have personally experienced longer performance histories with the fund.

A key policy to limit the possibility of bank runs is an explicit deposit insurance scheme, which can be either privately or government funded. Using syndicated loans from 63 countries during the period 1985–2016, we study the effect of government involvement in deposit insurance funding on price and non-price characteristics of loans. We show that changes from purely private-funded to either government-funded or jointly funded deposit insurance increase all-in-spread-drawn by approximately 4.6 %, further increase loan fees, decrease loan maturity, and increase the use of performance pricing provisions. Our findings are consistent with the moral hazard problem behind government-funded deposit insurance schemes.

We study the New York City taxi market to examine whether an excise tax hike on cigarettes corresponds to smoker taxi drivers more frequently cheating their customers. Increased cheating could be motivated by both financial pressures and as a reaction to unfair treatment (as surveyed smokers view cigarette tax hikes as quite unfair). We examine this question using detailed ride-level data where we can identify a rare but fraudulent overcharging technique (cheating) and a subsample of taxi drivers who smoke (affected taxpayers, identified via tickets for smoking in a cab). In difference-in-differences regressions we find that following a cigarette tax hike, taxi drivers who smoke are approximately 1.5 times more likely to cheat customers than other drivers. Our findings are strongest in the subsample of smokers with consistently low earnings.

The office has become a large scale organisational phenomenon accommodating large numbers of organisational employees most often housed in open plan and Activity Based Working settings that arguably resemble the new factory. This study examines contemporary Big 4 accounting firm office design innovations and their representation with a view to eliciting their claimed rationales, reflections of historical office design and management thinking, and apparent strategic agendas with respect to office efficiency, client relations and cost control involved in their offering of professional services. In doing so, it also explores the implications that public practice firms' office design may have for auditor independence and audit quality. Informed by Goffman's theories of impression management, the study employs historical and website analysis, finding a predominant firm focus on office efficiency and client relations with an undercurrent of cost reduction and revenue enhancement aspirations. While represented as innovative current office design and work pattern developments, public practice accounting firm office innovations and intentions are found to significantly reflect historical office design and management thinking, with dramaturgical circumspection of floor designs and props oriented towards creating front stage performances predesigned for clients' impression management. Where backstage redesign and frame breaking does not produce desired employee performance changes, some signs of retreating to more traditional floor redesign and territorial marker usage are evident. The study also signals the potential for innovative accounting firm office designs to carry some significant impacts upon audit independence and audit quality.

While the shareholder benefits of audits are well documented, evidence on whether audits can facilitate opportunistic behavior by corporate insiders is scarce. In this paper, we examine whether the audit process facilitates one particular form of opportunism: informed trading by corporate insiders. We focus our analysis on insider trading around the audit report date. We find an increase in trading around the audit report date and that the increase is abnormally large for firms that subsequently report modified opinions. The abnormal increase in trading is concentrated among officers and non-audit committee independent directors, and most pronounced in first-time modified opinions and modified opinions in years where financial results are subsequently restated. These trades are highly opportunistic: they predict restatements, and as a consequence, we show they avoid significant losses. Collectively, our findings provide novel evidence that insiders appear to exploit private information about the audit process––a process ostensibly designed to protect shareholders––for opportunistic gain.