We examine whether cost structure influences tax-motivated income shifting. We predict and find that U.S. multinational corporations (MNCs) with a less rigid cost structure engage in greater levels of tax-motivated income shifting relative to MNCs with a more rigid cost structure. This result is consistent with a less rigid cost structure providing greater flexibility to enable MNCs to take advantage of income-shifting opportunities. Further, we find that this relation is more pronounced when firms face greater costs in adjusting their operations, have less transfer pricing flexibility, and operate in a more uncertain environment. These results suggest that firms with less rigid cost structures possess the strategic operating and accounting flexibility necessary to take advantage of income-shifting opportunities. We provide evidence suggesting that a firm’s cost structure, a fundamental attribute of a firm’s business model, is a distinct and incrementally important determinant of tax-motivated income shifting. Data Availability: All data used in this study are publicly available.

No region of the United States fared worse over the postwar period than the Rust Belt. This paper analyzes how much of its decline can be accounted for by the persistent labor market conflict that characterized Rust Belt union-management relations. We develop a multisector, multiregion, dynamic general equilibrium model in which labor market conflict leads to strikes, wage premia, lower investment, and lower productivity growth. These lead to shrinking Rust Belt industries and to workers moving out of the Rust Belt. Labor conflict accounts for half of the decline in the region’s share of manufacturing employment. Foreign competition plays a smaller role, and its effects are concentrated after most of the region’s decline had already occurred.

We provide evidence from the first short-window event study of consumers’ perceptual responses to earnings announcements using daily consumer perception data. We document a positive association between the change in consumers’ overall perceptions of a brand at the time of the earnings announcement and the earnings surprise—that is, a positive consumer earnings response coefficient (CERC). CERC is larger when there is greater traditional news or social media activity, indicating that news dissemination is an important channel for consumers to respond to earnings news. Moreover, CERC varies based on brand and consumer characteristics. Changes in consumer perceptions at the time of the earnings announcement are positively associated with changes in purchase consideration and intent and with changes in realized future sales growth. To maximize identification, we document a positive and statistically significant CERC in a controlled experiment. Our findings demonstrate the importance of earnings to an important stakeholder. Data Availability: Data are available from the sources cited in the text.

Using the geographic location data of 218,554 commercial bank branches in China, we find that an increasing number of bank branches in the vicinity of enterprises, namely bank competition, leads to higher corporate employment, particularly for non-SOEs and SOEs with less government influence. Channel analyses reveal that better access to banking facilitates information extraction and eases credit constraints for surrounding firms, which thus increases labor investment. In addition, fintech development moderates the positive effect of bank competition on corporate employment. An exogenous policy shock as well as two instrumental variables, are used to correct for endogeneity and our results remain consistent. The findings are also robust to alternative samples, proxies, and different fixed effects. Further analyses show that bank competition improves firms’ labor investment efficiency and upgrades their employment structures. Lastly, increased employment improves the firm performance of non-SOEs.

We examine whether and how firms structure their merger and acquisition deals to avoid antitrust scrutiny. There are approximately 40% more mergers and acquisitions (M&As) than expected just below deal value thresholds that trigger antitrust review. These “stealth acquisitions” tend to involve financial and governance contract terms that afford greater scope for negotiating and assigning lower deal values. We also show that the equity values, gross margins, and product prices of acquiring firms and their competitors increase following such acquisitions. Our results suggest that acquirers manipulate M&As to avoid antitrust scrutiny, thereby benefiting their own shareholders but potentially harming other corporate stakeholders.

Measures of private equity (PE) performance based on cash flows do not account for a discount‐rate risk premium that is a component of the capital asset pricing model (CAPM) alpha. We create secondary market PE indices and find that PE discount rates vary considerably. Net asset values are too smooth because they fail to reflect variation in discount rates. Although the CAPM alpha for our index is zero, the generalized public market equivalent based on cash flows is large and positive. We obtain similar results for a set of synthetic funds that invest in small cap stocks. Ignoring variation in PE discount rates can lead to a misallocation of capital.

We use retail structured equity product (SEP) issuances to construct a new sentiment measure for large capitalization stocks. The SEP sentiment measure predicts negative abnormal returns on the SEP reference stocks based on a variety of factor models, and also predicts returns in Fama‐MacBeth regressions that include a wide range of covariates. Consistent with our interpretation that SEP issuances reflect investor sentiment, aggregate SEP issuances are highly correlated with the Baker‐Wurgler sentiment index. Tobit regressions reveal that proxies for attention and sentiment predict SEP issuance volumes, providing additional evidence consistent with the hypothesis that SEP issuances reflect sentiment.

Regulation is often proposed, developed, and finalized over a lengthy rule-making period prior to its adoption. We examine the period over which banking authorities discussed, adopted, and implemented Basel III to understand how firms respond to proposed regulation. We find evidence to suggest that affected banks not only lobbied rule-makers against it but also made strategic financial reporting changes and altered their business models in ways that reduced their exposure to the proposed rule prior to rule-makers finalizing the regulation. Further, our results indicate a sequential response, with banks responding through lobbying and strategic financial reporting prior to making business model changes. These findings highlight the interplay among firms’ financial reporting, business model, and political choices in response to proposed regulation and indicate that the appropriate date for an event study may be the regulation’s announcement date rather than its adoption or implementation dates.

This paper provides a comprehensive survey of existing measures of uncertainty, risk, and volatility, noting their conceptual distinctions. It summarizes how they are constructed, their relative advantages in usage, and their effects on financial market and economic outcomes. The measures are divided into four categories based on the construction methodology: news-based, survey-based, econometric-based, and market-based measures. While heightened uncertainty is typically associated with negative real and financial outcomes, the magnitude of these effects and the interpretation of transmission channels crucially depend on identification considerations.

This study examines the incremental predictive power of aggregate measures of financial misreporting for recession and real gross domestic product (GDP) growth. We draw on prior research suggesting that misreporting has real economic effects because it represents misinformation on which firms base their investment, hiring, and production decisions. We find that aggregate M-Score incrementally predicts recessions at forecast horizons of five to eight quarters ahead. We also find that aggregate M-Score is significantly associated with lower future growth in real GDP, real investment, consumption, and industrial production. Additionally, our result that aggregate M-Score predicts lower real investment one to four quarters ahead partially accounts for why misreporting predicts recessions five to eight quarters ahead. Our findings are weaker when we use aggregate F-Score as a proxy for misreporting. Overall, this study provides novel evidence that aggregate misreporting measures can aid forecasters and regulators in predicting recessions and real GDP growth.