Does corporate governance affect the timing of large investment projects? Hazard model estimates suggest strong shareholder governance may deter managers from pursuing large investments. Controlling for investment opportunities, firms with good governance experience longer spells between large investments. However, in the presence of financial constraints or strong CEO incentives (high delta (δ)), we find no such timing differences. Finally, these higher investment hazard firms exhibit significantly negative long-run operating and stock performance. Overall, our findings are consistent with the notion that poor governance associates with overinvestment.

We show theoretically that optimism can lead a risk-averse Chief Executive Officer (CEO) to choose the first-best investment level that maximizes shareholder value. Optimism below (above) the interior optimum leads the CEO to underinvest (overinvest). Hence, if boards of directors act in the interests of shareholders, CEOs with relatively low or high optimism face a higher probability of forced turnover than moderately optimistic CEOs face. Using a large sample of turnovers, we find strong empirical support for this prediction. The results are consistent with the view that there is an interior optimum level of managerial optimism that maximizes firm value.

Prior studies conclude that firms’ equity underperforms following many individual sorts of external financing. These conclusions naturally raise significant questions about market efficiency and/or about the techniques used to measure long-run “abnormal returns.” Rather than concentrating on a single security type or issuance, we examine long-run performance following any and all sorts of security issuances. Initial financing events do not associate with underperformance; however, subsequent financings do. Our results suggest that negative post-issuance returns have nothing to do with the specific type of security issued, and everything to do with the number of types of securities issued.

We show that the effects of taxes on labor supply are shaped by interactions between adjustment costs for workers and hours constraints set by firms. We develop a model in which firms post job offers characterized by an hours requirement and workers pay search costs to find jobs. We present evidence supporting three predictions of this model by analyzing bunching at kinks using Danish tax records. First, larger kinks generate larger taxable income elasticities. Second, kinks that apply to a larger group of workers generate larger elasticities. Third, the distribution of job offers is tailored to match workers' aggregate tax preferences in equilibrium. Our results suggest that macro elasticities may be substantially larger than the estimates obtained using standard microeconometric methods.

We use student assignment lotteries to estimate the effect of charter school attendance on student achievement in Boston. We also evaluate a related alternative, Boston's pilot schools. Pilot schools have some of the independence of charter schools but are in the Boston Public School district and are covered by some collective bargaining provisions. Lottery estimates show large and significant score gains for charter students in middle and high school. In contrast, lottery estimates for pilot school students are mostly small and insignificant, with some significant negative effects. Charter schools with binding assignment lotteries appear to generate larger gains than other charters.

Recent accounting scandals have resulted in regulatory initiatives designed to strengthen audit committee oversight of corporate financial reporting and have led to a concern that U.S. GAAP has become too rules-based. We examine issues related to these initiatives using two experiments. CFOs in our experiments exhibit more agreement and are less likely to report aggressively under a less precise (more principles-based) standard than under a more precise (more rules-based) standard. Our results also indicate that CFOs applying a more precise standard are less likely to report aggressively in the presence of a strong audit committee than a weak audit committee. We find no effect of audit committee strength when the standard is less precise. Finally, we find support for a three-path mediating model examining mechanisms driving the effect of standard precision on aggressive reporting decisions. These results should be of interest to U.S. policymakers as they continue to contemplate a shift to more principles-based accounting standards (e.g., IFRS).

We propose a new, valuation-based measure of world equity market segmentation. While we observe decreased levels of segmentation in many countries, the level of segmentation remains significant in emerging markets. We characterize the factors that account for variation in market segmentation both through time as well as across countries. Both a country's regulation with respect to foreign capital flows and certain nonregulatory factors are important. In particular, we identify a country's political risk profile and its stock market development as two additional local segmentation factors as well as the U.S. corporate credit spread as a global segmentation factor.

This paper describes the progress, eight years after matriculating, of 586 individuals who entered one of 27 economics Ph.D. programs in fall 2002. By October 2010, 59 percent of the fall 2002 entering cohort had earned a Ph.D. in economics at the university where they initially matriculated, 37 percent had dropped out, and 4 percent were still writing their dissertations.We examine student outcomes by Ph.D. program tier and investigate factors associated with completion and time to degree. We document and describe the rise in median time to degree from 5.0 to 5.6 years during the period 1996–2010.

This paper examines the intersection between two aspects of climate policy design. The first is the point of regulation: should it be placed on pollution sources, carbon-rich inputs, or consumers? The second aspect concerns the external effects of a local climate policy. Leakage occurs when partial regulation results in an increase in emissions in unregulated parts of the economy. Our model demonstrates how directly regulating polluters can increase foreign emissions while indirect regulation (either upstream or downstream of the pollution source) will decrease foreign emissions. The net effect on combined domestic and foreign emissions will depend on market elasticities.