Tao Chen, Xi Xiong, and Kunru Zou ♦ Exploring the minimum wage policy discontinuities at county borders, we find that minimum wage hikes induce industrial firms to pollute more and reduce their abatement efforts. State ownership mitigates these negative effects,…
Sumit Agarwal, Gene Amromin, Itzhak Ben-David, and Douglas D. Evanoff ♦ We study a specific practice of predatory lending: borrowers being rejected and approved in rapid succession by the same lender. We show that in such cases borrower and contract…
Massimo Massa, David Schumacher, and Yan Wang ♦ We highlight an important but overlooked characteristic of financial fragility: “fragile” stocks command higher liquidity. This reduces their sensitivity to corporate actions with price impact and affects the firms’ incentives to engage…
Heitor Almeida, Slava Fos, Po-Hsuan Hsu, Mathias Kronlund, and Kevin Tseng ♦ Firms become more efficient at innovation when they face pressure to meet Earnings Per Share (EPS) targets and using stock repurchases. Using a regression-discontinuity framework, we find that incentives…
Bo Huang, Jiacui Li, Tse-Chun Lin, Mingzhu Tai, and Zoey Yiyuan Zhou ♦ We show that attention constraints on decision-makers create barriers to financial inclusion. Using administrative data on retail loan-screening processes, we find that attention-constrained loan officers exert less…
John M. Bizjak, Swaminathan L. Kalpathy, Vassil T. Mihov, and Jue Ren ♦ Using establishment-level data, we show that COVID-19 vaccinations boost business activity and firm performance in the United States. A 10% increase in vaccination rates results in a…
