Political identity and partisanship are salient features of today's society. Using deeds records and voter rolls, we show that current residents are more likely to sell their homes when opposite‐party neighbors move in nearby than when unaffiliated or same‐party neighbors do. This is especially true when the new neighbors are politically active, consistent with an animosity between parties mechanism. We conclude that affective polarization is not limited to purely political settings and affects one of the household's most important financial decisions, their home transactions.

We show that firms collect almost 70% of their cash flows in the second half of the fiscal year, and that firms that collect more cash by year-end earn a 6.8% higher per annum risk premium and save more cash. We rationalize these facts in a quantitative investment-based asset pricing model. Immediate cash payments negatively affect profitability, but reduce equity financing costs by increasing information transparency. Financially constrained firms optimally collect more cash at year-end when firms’ performance attracts more attention and information transparency is more valuable. Such behavior further results in greater exposure to aggregate productivity and financial shocks.

Using a Supreme Court ruling that rejected the use of “bright-line” rules previously relied upon in evaluating materiality claims, this study examines how heightened materiality uncertainty impacts audit pricing. We expect the heightened uncertainty to make it more difficult for auditors and clients to assess materiality and to reach a consensus on materiality assessment, which increases audit effort and engagement risk, leading to higher audit fees. Consistent with this prediction, we find that after the ruling, audit fees increase significantly for treatment firms in the circuits using bright-line rules in the pre-ruling period, relative to control firms not affected by the ruling. This effect is stronger when auditors have lower quality or lower industry expertise, and when investors have more diverse opinions. We also find that for firms audited by low-expertise auditors, auditor turnover due to auditor-client disagreement on materiality-related issues increases significantly for treatment firms relative to control firms. Data Availability: Data are available from the public sources cited in the text.

We argue that contracting with the federal government involves significant proprietary information cost due to regulations requiring contractors to provide proprietary information, which may become available to outsiders via Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. We provide evidence by showing that firms become more willing to bid for government contracts after a recent Supreme Court ruling on FOIA (Food Marketing Institute v. Argus Leader Media) that improved information protection for contractors and that this effect strengthens when the contracts entail higher proprietary information cost for contractors. Data Availability: Data are available from the public sources cited in the text.