I combine personnel records with vital statistics for 1910 to 1925 to study how bureaucratic representation affected mortality in 1,271 Indian towns during the 1918 influenza pandemic. Exploiting the rotation of senior colonial officers across districts and a cross-border comparison, towns headed by Indian (as opposed to British) district officers experienced 15 percentage points lower deaths. The lower mortality effects extended beyond the urban areas and coincided with greater responsiveness in relief provision. Bureaucratic representation can thus be a powerful way to increase state responsiveness during times of crisis.

This study examines whether and how media coverage improves price discovery before earnings announcements. Given the broad reach and timeliness of media coverage, understanding its role in forming earnings expectations is important. I posit that the media specialize in searching for and screening news, while institutional investors and financial analysts specialize in interpreting and integrating information. I expect these coordinated efforts to improve earnings expectations and preempt upcoming earnings announcements. Consistent with this prediction, I find (i) preannouncement media coverage is negatively associated with price revaluations during earnings announcements, (ii) preannouncement media coverage is positively associated with institutional investors' information acquisition and financial analysts' forecast frequency, and (iii) institutional information acquisition and analyst forecast activity are two mechanisms by which media coverage preempts upcoming earnings. My main results are robust to short‐window tests and identification concerns. Overall, my findings suggest that media coverage coordinates information efforts and accelerates the incorporation of information in prices, facilitating preannouncement price discovery.

This article studies how changes in investor protection regulations affect local entrepreneurial activity, relying on the heterogeneous impact of a 2011 SEC regulation change on the definition of accredited investors across U.S. cities. Using a difference-in-differences approach, I show that cities more affected by the regulation change experienced a significantly larger decrease in local angel financing, entrepreneurial activity, innovation output, employment, and sales. I find that small business loans and second-lien mortgages became entrepreneurs’ partial substitutes for angel investment. My cost-benefit analysis suggests that the costs of protecting angel investors through the 2011 regulation change outweigh its benefits.

This article examines the strategic nature of banks’ charitable giving by studying bank donations to local nonprofit organizations. Relying on the application of antitrust rules in bank mergers as an exogenous shock to local deposit market competition, we find that local competition affects banks’ local donation decisions. Using county-level natural disaster shocks, we show that banks with disaster exposure reallocate donations away from nonshocked counties, where they operate branches, and toward shocked counties. The reallocation of donations represents an exogenous increase in the local share of donations in nonshocked counties for banks with no disaster exposure and leads to an increase in the local deposit market shares of such banks. Furthermore, banks can potentially earn greater profits from making donations and tend to donate to nonprofits that have the most social impact. Overall, our evidence suggests that banks participate in corporate philanthropy strategically to enhance performance.

This paper investigates whether a firm's debt maturity structure affects the quality of its risk disclosures. Using a sample of U.S. public firms from 2005 to 2017, we provide robust evidence that a firm's exposure to refinancing risk, measured as the proportion of long-term debt that matures within one year, is positively correlated with the readability and specificity of risk disclosures. This relationship is stronger for firms that have greater concerns over refinancing risk and for firms operating in environments with lower proprietary disclosure costs. In addition, we show that high-quality risk disclosures can help firms mitigate refinancing risk by reducing the cost of future debt financing. Our study extends the current literature on risk disclosures and enhances the understanding of how refinancing risk shapes corporate disclosures.

We examine subjective risk premia implied by return expectations of individual investors and professionals for portfolios of stocks, bonds, currencies, and commodity futures. While in-sample predictive regressions with realized excess returns suggest that objective risk premia vary countercyclically with business-cycle and asset-valuation measures, subjective risk premia extracted from survey data are largely acyclical. Out-of-sample forecasts of excess returns exhibit a similar lack of cyclicality, which suggests that investors’ learning of forecasting relationships in real time may help explain the cyclicality gap. There is a subjective risk-return tradeoff, with subjective risk premia increasing in subjective perceptions of risk quantity.

An assimilation bias occurs when people’s evaluative judgment is positively influenced by a previously observed signal. We study this effect by examining investors’ appraisal of M&A deals announced 1 day after other firms in the same 1-digit SIC as the merging parties release earnings surprises. Consistent with assimilation effects, acquirers’ M&A announcement stock return initially correlates with the previous day’s earnings surprises. This effect reverses after 1 week. Assimilation generates other distortions as more positive surprises are related to increases in bid competition, takeover premiums, and withdrawn M&As. Evidence from IPOs corroborates the presence of assimilation effects in financial markets.