This study examines the impact of recreational marijuana laws (RMLs) on firm-level employment using an imputation-based difference-in-differences (DiD) approach across U.S. states. RMLs significantly reduce employment, particularly among firms with high-skilled labor, strong union presence, permissive corporate cultures, and in states with greater dispensary density. Alternative explanations—including economic crises, COVID-19, fiscal changes, labor regulations, and related policies such as smoking bans and right-to-work (RTW) laws—are systematically ruled out through a series of placebo and robustness tests. RMLs also reduce investment, sales growth, and innovation, suggesting that legalization introduces labor-related frictions with broad implications for firm performance and long-term dynamism.

This paper provides the first systematic evidence on a recent industry innovation: money market funds offering multiple intraday NAV strikes and redemption windows. Emerging after the 2016 floating-NAV reforms, these multistrike funds hold safer, more liquid assets than traditional single-strike funds offering end-of-day redemptions, yet face substantially larger outflows during periods of market stress. Our findings point to a structural concentration of liquidity-sensitive investors in multistrike funds, revealing how fund microstructure influences run dynamics among sophisticated institutions. Despite evolving liquidity requirements, the core behavioral and structural differences we identify remain highly relevant for evaluating ongoing and future regulatory reforms

Privately informed about firm fundamentals, corporate insiders detect activism-motivated trades better than other traders. This article solves the model of this novel form of insider trading motivated by noninsider information and presents empirical evidence. Corporate insiders preserve their ownership (restraining from selling or buying more) before activist interventions go public to benefit from price appreciation and to defend their private benefits of control. Surveillance technology facilitates response to predisclosure activist trading, especially when positive information about firm fundamentals is absent, supporting the mechanism that insiders attribute order flows to activist interest when speculation on fundamentals can be ruled out.

Prior research has pointed to differences in organizational capital as a reason for the persistent performance discrepancies among otherwise similar firms. In this paper, we develop and validate a new measure of organizational capital. Based on over a million crowd‐sourced employee reviews scraped from Glassdoor, we construct the measure of organizational capital at the firm‐year level using the word embedding model and ChatGPT‐generated synthetic reviews. Our measure varies over time in accordance with macro trends, and differs both across and within firms, reflecting firm heterogeneity and major internal changes. We validate our measure by testing empirical predictions of the properties of organizational capital discussed in prior literature. Our findings suggest that this measure captures a slowly evolving intangible asset that is significantly associated with firm performance and top management's influence, aligning with the conceptualization of organizational capital by Dessein and Prat. We further showcase applications of our measure in accounting, economics, finance, and management literature. Taken together, the paper provides implications for various stakeholders who are interested in assessing and managing firms' organizational capital.

We examine the economic impact of platform marketing on mutual funds and fund families in China. The growth of platform marketing encourages funds to enhance performance by improving managerial skills rather than increasing risk-taking, and inspires fund families to induce more frequent fee reductions and stronger product innovation. Enhanced competitiveness and expanded investment demand lead to greater market share and higher profitability. Platform marketing intensity from funds in other families and the same type of funds generates more pronounced economic effects. Our findings reveal how distribution platforms contribute to incentive-aligned market mechanisms in the wealth management industry.

During the COVID-19 pandemic (2020-2022), Chinese cities witnessed a paradox: residential land and new house prices surged while transaction volumes plummeted. We attribute this to local governments’ active price management through supply controls, land acquisitions by local government financing vehicles (LGFVs), and limits on new home sales permits. Cities more dependent on land sales and land-backed debt before the pandemic experienced greater price increases and price–volume divergence, with LGFVs buying more land at higher prices than other buyers. These interventions helped sustain fiscal financing but deepened developers’ financial distress, revealing unintended consequences of local governments’ fiscal strategies during downturns.