This study examines the relation between exposure to social tax discontent—public expressions of frustration about others’ tax avoidance on social media—and individual tax avoidance. Economic and psychological theories predict bidirectional effects: discontent may reduce avoidance by inducing internal sanctions (e.g., shame and guilt) or increase avoidance by normalizing noncompliance through perceived prevalence. Using a novel, large-scale measure of tax discontent derived from geolocated Twitter data and a language classification model, we find that increases in social tax discontent are associated with reductions in estimated tax avoidance. The effect is stronger among high-income groups, in response to tweets targeting wealthy individuals, and in areas with higher political engagement and social media activity. Our results reinforce the importance of taxpayers’ social and behavioral motivations and suggest that jurisdictions’ efforts to manage taxpayer beliefs and leverage social norms can act as a complementary tool to traditional enforcement. Data Availability: The data used in this study are derived from public and third-party sources described in the text: the IRS Statistics of Income, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, Google Trends, and the National Neighborhood Data Archive. Twitter/X data were collected via the Twitter Application Programming Interface (API) under its academic-access terms and are subject to Twitter’s/X’s terms of use; they cannot be redistributed by the authors, but the collection and classification procedures are described in Section IV.

Americans rarely marry outside their race or class group, a pattern with well-documented implications for inequality and intergenerational mobility. Limited exposure may partly explain these low intergroup marriage rates. We instrument for exposure using variation in childhood neighborhoods based on whether other race and class groups had more opposite-sex children of similar age. Exposure increases interclass (high- and low-parent income) marriage but has no detectable effect on interracial (White and Black) marriage. A spatial marriage model predicts that residential segregation—one of many forms of exposure—accounts for more than one-third of marital sorting by class but less than 5 percent by race.

The FASB recently issued ASU 2024-03, which requires disaggregation of significant expenses, like cost of goods sold (COGS) and selling, general, and administrative (SG&A) expenses. Proponents argue disaggregation will improve decision usefulness, whereas opponents suggest the information will be costly and provide little value. We provide large-sample evidence on the pre-ASU state of expense disaggregation, analyze whether it appears to provide decision-useful information, and explore differences across disaggregation components. Our findings suggest that disaggregation is relatively common, increasing over time, and correlated with demand for disclosure, disclosure incentives, and firm economics. Further, our evidence is consistent with COGS, but not SG&A, disaggregation providing decision-useful information for investors and analysts, and these benefits accrue via improved processing of expense-related news. Overall, our evidence suggests that not all disaggregation is equal. We also identify novel, large-sample expense disaggregation measures for U.S. firms, which are likely useful for evaluating other implications of disaggregation. Data Availability: Data are available from the public sources cited in the text.

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.

This paper examines the nature of entrepreneurship using a novel panel dataset based on US Internal Revenue Service data. We analyze income growth trajectories and the determinants of entrepreneurial choice for business owners. Compared with prior household survey–based studies, we find that self-employed individuals have significantly higher average incomes and steeper income growth than their wage-earning matched peers. Contrary to survey evidence, we find a limited role for nonpecuniary motives, uninsurable risk, and liquidity constraints driving entrepreneurial choice. Prior work experience predicts entrepreneurial entry. Entry and exit rates into self-employment remain stable over time, including during the Great Recession.

The goal of this paper is to link attitude toward risk over personal consumption with attitude toward risk over social consumptions. Because many everyday choices involve risk, these attitudes enter virtually every realm of individual decision-making. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions for deducing preferences over risky social choices (which have consequences both for the Decision Maker and for others) from risky personal choices (which have consequences only for the Decision Maker) and riskless social choices, and we offer an experimental test of the theory. The experiments generate a rich dataset that enables completely non-parametric revealed preference tests of the theory at the level of the individual subject. Many subjects behave as predicted by the theory but a substantial fraction do not.

This study examines how tenured BAF experience and navigate institutional structures while advancing their careers. Leveraging a qualitative approach, we find BAF encounter recurring forms of marginalization embedded in organizational structures that lead to social identity threats that destabilize their identities as scholars and teachers. BAF respond to these threats by employing agentic and self-preserving coping responses designed to affirm identity and negotiate career advancement. Although coping responses can be effective on an individual level, they do not transform institutional structures and can provoke pushback that reinscribes marginalization. The findings unsettle common assumptions that effort in conditions marked by objectivity and neutrality drives career advancement and highlight the institutional structures and invisible labor that BAF navigate to achieve career advancement. We fill the void in the literature examining how career advancement unfolds within racialized conditions of academic institutions and advance research on minoritized group status in accounting academia.

Managers can boost reported earnings to meet capital market expectations by pursuing aggressive cost-minimization strategies that violate labor laws, such as pressuring frontline employees to forgo safety protocols or work off the clock. We investigate whether labor law violations, which benefit the firm at the expense of employees, fall disproportionately on nonwhite frontline employees. Across similar locations (e.g., stores or plants) within the same firm, we predict and find that locations with a higher share of nonwhite frontline employees are more likely to experience a labor law violation. This racial inequality in labor violations is especially pronounced in settings more prone to racial discrimination and during periods of acute capital market pressure to meet earnings benchmarks, providing insight into the mechanisms underlying the observed disparity. Our evidence suggests that capital market pressure is associated not only with labor violations but also with racial inequality in exposure to those violations. Data Availability: Data are available from the sources cited in the text.

Macroeconomic forces are challenging the ability of audit firms to sustain engagement profitability. Although one available strategy for multinational clients is to employ non-U.S. firms as component auditors (CAs), the impacts of this choice are unclear. We investigate the influence of CAs on engagement economics in Big 6 audits from 2012 to 2022, a period of increasing non-U.S. labor use. Results show that global hours increase with CA participation, suggesting that additional CA labor is needed to substitute for each U.S. hour. Global billing rates decline, implying that principal auditors share savings from lower cost labor with clients. However, U.S. lead team realizations rise with increasing substitution of non-U.S. labor, incentivizing more extensive CA use. Further analysis shows that these impacts are concentrated in engagements with high CA participation in countries with low wages and low English proficiency. Audit quality is not reduced by greater substitution of non-U.S. labor.