We collect and analyze detailed filings from global institutional investors to estimate foreign investors’ U.S. dollar (USD) security holdings and currency hedging. Over two decades, foreign USD holdings grew sixfold, while hedge ratios rose by 15 percentage points after the 2008–2009 crisis. Currency hedging across mutual funds, pensions, and insurance reached $2 trillion by 2019. Hedging demand varies across investors, currency areas, and banking systems. We show that expected FX returns, beyond variance minimization, drive currency exposure in portfolios. Finally, we demonstrate and quantify how aggregate hedging demand affects hedging costs in the presence of constrained intermediaries.

We examine the effect of disclosing the potential financial impact of sustainability activities (FISA) on investor decisions. We posit and find that the effect is moderated by both companies' financial condition and investors' view on sustainability. Our results suggest that investors with a stakeholder value-maximization view are not sensitive to the FISA disclosure regardless of the company's financial condition. However, investors holding a shareholder expense view exhibit significantly higher investment interest in the presence of a FISA disclosure when the company's financial condition is favorable, but not when it is unfavorable. Additional analysis suggests that the presence of FISA leads to differential belief updates for investors with different ex-ante beliefs about the benefits of sustainability. Our study provides practical insights into the effect of disclosing the financial effects of sustainability activities. It has implications for integrated reporting and the disclosure of the connectivity between sustainability and financial performance proposed by standard setters. It also contributes to the literature on the relevance of non-financial information and investor type to investment decisions.

Women often lack the opportunity to join exclusive social clubs, limiting the benefits they derive from their social networks. We investigate whether, when given the opportunity to interact with the right people in a professional setting, women gain greater advantages from these connections for career performance and advancement compared to men. Using a unique data set that documents when, where, and with whom financial analysts interact at investor conferences, we find that female analysts show greater improvement in earnings forecast accuracy than their male counterparts after interacting with a firm's executives. Further evidence suggests that female analysts overcome homophily in conference interactions with executives and that they sustain their gains, enhancing forecast accuracy for up to three years. In addition, both the capital and labor markets recognize women's superior gains from conference connections. Our findings suggest that women capitalize on professional connections, highlighting the importance of promoting structured networking opportunities for women in professional environments.

Using data from a large telecom service provider in China between 2014 and 2019, we examine the impact of being passed over for promotion on subsequent performance for middle managers. Specifically, we find that there is a negative association between high promotion probability and post-pass over performance changes. Such negative association is less pronounced when bonus incentives are stronger and when promotions are more predictable. Our research highlights a hidden cost of promotion incentives and strategies organizations can use to mitigate this unintended negative effect for promotion pass over on high performers. Data Availability: The data used in this study are proprietary. Access to the data may be granted upon request, subject to the approval of the data providers and compliance with confidentiality agreements.

Using a dataset constructed through textual analysis and manual data collection, we show that, prior to ASC 606, firms with principal-versus-agent (PA) exposure face heightened GAAP compliance risk, reflected in a greater likelihood of receiving revenue-related SEC comment letters and higher audit fees. Following the adoption of ASC 606, these differences decline, consistent with the standard’s stated goal of simplifying PA assessments and reducing implementation challenges. Overall, our findings provide the first large-sample evidence on PA considerations and show that ASC 606 mitigates compliance risk, although further analyses suggest additional disclosure may be needed to mitigate information challenges associated with PA assessments. Data Availability: Data are available from the public sources cited in the text.

Revenue-sharing contracts allow firms that are distant from their target markets to leverage sellers' local expertise. Although these contracts align incentives in operational decisions, they also introduce the potential for sellers to underreport revenues. We analyze film-level box office data from 7,309 Chinese cinemas and find that cinemas report significantly lower revenues for foreign films than for comparable domestic films, consistent with foreign producers being less able to monitor reported revenues due to geographic distance. The underreporting of foreign films is lower in cities with widespread mobile payments, in multi-unit cinemas, and when foreign films have more predictable revenues, suggesting institutional factors that increase detection likelihood can mitigate underreporting. Further tests indicate the lower reported box office revenues of foreign films is not due to government intervention. Our findings provide novel evidence of product-level misreporting under revenue-sharing contracts and offer insights on mitigating these risks in international markets. Data availability: Data are available via the sources specified in the paper. The authors greatly appreciate the data supplied by EntGroup (http://english.entgroup.com.cn/enbase.html) but are not able to share the data based on the agreement with Entgroup.