Peter Brok ♦ Empirically, the effect of corporate tax rates on leverage has been smaller than expected based on trade-off theory. In this paper, I show that tax avoidance functions as a non-debt tax shield, reducing the benefits of the…
Simi Kedia and Ankur Pareek ♦ We use a sharp RDD to show that victories by women candidates in close House, Senate, and gubernatorial elections increase female directors in local firms. The causal effect is higher when candidate’s media coverage is…
Paul Schultz ♦ Stocks that are expensive to borrow underperform significantly and for long periods of time. Every share must be held by an investor who doesn’t lend it out and hence loses money. I find no evidence that investors…
Xiang Li ♦ I analyze the effects of bank competition on gender and racial gaps in entrepreneurship. By leveraging interstate bank deregulation from 1994 to 2021, I find that stronger bank competition increases the quantity and quality of banking services…
Harold Contreras, Jana Fidrmuc, and Roman Kozhan ♦ We study the information content of corporate insiders’ trades after earnings announcements. We find little evidence that insiders trade on foreknowledge of material information in the post-SOX period. Conditioning on short-selling activity as a…
Junye Li, Lucio Sarno, and Gabriele Zinna ♦ Using model-free skewness measures that exploit the asymmetry in semivariances and option data from the over-the-counter currency market, we find that buying currencies with a high skewness risk premium (SRP) and selling…
