We construct a measure ( fLMA ) of the extent to which neighboring firms hire similar types of workers, based on the similarity between the labor profile of a firm and that of its locality. We show that a firm’s innovation is positively related to fLMA. The enhanced labor mobility induced by higher fLMA is an important channel for this positive relation. This relation is stronger when firms have increased outside job opportunities for employees, increased knowledge spillovers via coworkership, and more employee stock options. Innovation is higher when intellectual property ownership is with employers, not employees. This effect increases in fLMA.

This article shows that when a compensation peer firm experiences a significant failure in its say-on-pay (SOP) voting, the focal firm’s stock price is adversely affected, resulting in reduced CEO pay in the subsequent period. This pay-reduction effect is amplified when the board is more powerful, when proxy advisors express concerns about CEO pay, and when the compensation consultant lacks quality. Directors who react to the price drop and cut the CEO’s pay receive higher votes in future director elections, implying a market feedback effect for directors of the focal firm triggered by their peers’ SOP voting failure.

Using high-frequency data on over 7 million import transactions, we study the disruptions to U.S. firms’ trade patterns and growth immediately following the initial COVID-19 trade shock. While large firms were not direct recipients of government fiscal support, they experienced fewer disruptions when located in counties where small businesses (SMEs) received government stimulus loans under the Paycheck Protection Program. These effects were largest in counties with greater share of SMEs and stronger input–output linkages between large firms and SMEs. Our results point to local spillovers between SMEs and large firms as being an important determinant of firm resiliency during crises.

Fund flows are more correlated among funds with similar investment horizon, consistent with correlated demand for liquidity. We find that stocks held by institutions with more heterogeneous investment horizon are more liquid and have lower volatility of liquidity. Identification tests confirm that the improvement in stock liquidity holds when the increase in investor heterogeneity arises from an exogenous shock due to the 2003 tax reform. In addition, extreme flow-induced trading by institutional funds has a bigger price impact when stocks have a less heterogeneous investor base. Moreover, the premium associated with stock illiquidity is concentrated in stocks with low investor heterogeneity.

In this study, we examine whether internal control over financial reporting affects firm operational efficiency. We find that operational efficiency, derived from frontier analysis, is significantly lower among firms with material weaknesses in internal control relative to firms without such weaknesses. We also find that the remediation of material weaknesses leads to an improvement in operational efficiency. Additional analyses indicate that the negative effect of material weaknesses on operational efficiency is stronger for firms with a greater demand for higher quality information for decision making, for weaknesses that are deemed to be more severe, and to a certain extent, for smaller firms. Overall, our study extends the literature by presenting systematic evidence on the effect of effective internal control on operational efficiency and informs the debate over the costs and benefits of the internal control reporting requirements under the Sarbanes‐Oxley Act of 2002.

We find that the tail risk of a firm's stock returns is positively affected by the tail risk of other firms held by the same common institutional blockholder (CIB). The CIB peer effect on tail risk increases (decreases) after exogenous initiations (terminations) of peer connections via CIB ownership, consistent with a causal interpretation. Our findings support the disclosure herding hypothesis, which predicts that firms release bad news after other firms’ bad news announcements. In addition, commonality in the real investment decisions of a firm and its CIB peers, along with the common trading pressure of these firms, contribute to the positive relationship between firms’ tail risk, highlighting the multifaceted roles of institutional investors in the contagion of firms’ tail risk. Finally, the CIB peer effect on tail risk is stronger when the CEO is more risk averse, CIBs hold more shares, or CIBs are pressure-sensitive (i.e., banks and insurance companies).

China has been adopting a “mercantilist” policy by lavishing massive government subsidies on Chinese firms. Using hand-collected subsidy data on Chinese listed companies, we find that firms receiving more subsidies tend to have a lower cost of debt. However, such firms fail to have superior financial performance. Instead, firms with more subsidies tend to be overstaffed, which demonstrates higher social performance. These results are mainly driven by non-tax-based subsidies rather than tax-based subsidies. Overall, our results suggest that the Chinese government uses non-tax-based subsidies to achieve its social policy objectives at the expense of firms’ profitability.

This paper examines the profits of revenue, earnings, and price momentum strategies in an attempt to understand investor reactions when facing multiple information of firm performance in various scenarios. We first offer evidence that there is no dominating momentum strategy among the revenue, earnings, and price momentums, suggesting that revenue surprises, earnings surprises, and prior returns each carry some exclusive unpriced information content. We next show that the profits of momentum driven by firm fundamental performance information (revenue or earnings) depend upon the accompanying firm market performance information (price), and vice versa. The robust monotonicity in multivariate momentum returns is consistent with the argument that the market does not only underestimate the individual information but also the joint implications of multiple information on firm performance, particularly when they point in the same direction. A three-way combined momentum strategy may offer monthly return as high as 1.44%. The information conveyed by revenue surprises and earnings surprises combined account for about 19% of price momentum effects, which finding adds to the large literature on tracing the sources of price momentum.

This study investigates the investment decision and dividend policy jointly from a non-steady state to a steady state. We extend Higgins, 1977, Higgins, 1981, Higgins, 2008 sustainable growth rate model and develop a dynamic model which jointly optimizes the growth rate and payout ratio. We optimize the firm value to obtain the optimal growth rate in terms of a logistic equation and find that the steady state growth rate can be used as the benchmark for the mean-reverting process of the optimal growth rate. We also investigate the specification error of the mean and variance of dividend per share when introducing the stochastic growth rate. Empirical results support the mean-reverting process of the growth rate and the importance of covariance between the profitability and the growth rate in determining dividend payouts. The intertemporal behavior of the covariance may shed some light on the fact of disappearing dividends over decades.

Nonexperimental data are used to evaluate impacts of a Bolivian preschool program on cognitive, psychosocial, and anthropometric outcomes. Impacts are shown to be highly dependent on age and exposure duration. To minimize the effect of distributional assumptions, program impacts are estimated as nonparametric functions of age and duration. A generalized matching estimator is developed and used to control for nonrandom selectivity into the program and into exposure durations. Comparisons with three groups—children in the feeder area not in the program, children in the program for ≤ 1 month, and children living in similar areas without the program—indicate that estimates are robust for significant positive effects of the program on cognitive and psychosocial outcomes with ≥ 7 months' exposure, although the age patterns of effects differ slightly by comparison group.