Handgun waiting periods are laws that impose a delay between the initiation of a purchase and final acquisition of a firearm. We show that waiting periods, which create a "cooling off" period among buyers, significantly reduce the incidence of gun violence. We estimate the impact of waiting periods on gun deaths, exploiting all changes to state-level policies in the Unites States since 1970. We find that waiting periods reduce gun homicides by roughly 17%. We provide further support for the causal impact of waiting periods on homicides by exploiting a natural experiment resulting from a federal law in 1994 that imposed a temporary waiting period on a subset of states.

We use a U.S. Supreme Court case, Morrison v. National Australia Bank (2010), as a natural experiment to test the legal bonding hypothesis. By decreasing the potential liability of U.S.-listed foreign firms, particularly due to class action lawsuits, Morrison arguably eroded their legal bonding to compliance with disclosure duties. Nevertheless, we find evidence of an increase or insignificant change in share values. Tests of longer-run effects of the legal event indicate that foreign firms' disclosure quality and likelihood of facing enforcement actions remained stable, as did investors' revealed preferences for trading on US markets. These results go against the legal bonding hypothesis but are consistent with reputational bonding and with market-based accounts of US cross-listing. Our results may contribute to ongoing debate about civil enforcement of securities laws through class actions.

There have been dozens of high-profile mass shootings in recent decades. This paper presents three main findings about the impact of mass shootings on gun policy. First, mass shootings evoke large policy responses. A single mass shooting leads to a 15% increase in the number of firearm bills introduced within a state in the year after a mass shooting. This effect increases with the extent of media coverage. Second, mass shootings account for a small portion of all gun deaths, but have an outsized influence relative to other homicides. Third, when looking at bills that were actually enacted into law, the impact of mass shootings depends on the party in power. The annual number of laws that loosen gun restrictions doubles in the year following a mass shooting in states with Republican-controlled legislatures. We find no significant effect of mass shootings on laws enacted when there is a Democrat-controlled legislature, nor do we find a significant effect of mass shootings on the enactment of laws that tighten gun restrictions.

CEOs increasingly engage in activism on controversial social and political issues that do not directly affect their core businesses. Simultaneously, the general public is increasingly politically polarized. We examine how CEO support for gun control after two mass shootings differentially affected the behavior of liberal and conservative consumers and the persistence of these effects. Using mobile phone location data to measure store-level visits, we find (a) consumer visits to stores decreased by three percent; (b) this decrease was asymmetric: visits in the most conservative counties decreased by about five percent but did not change in the most liberal counties; and (c) these effects dissipated within 10 weeks after activism. Our results highlight the strategic implications for executives pressured to take stances on controversial issues.

Theory posits hierarchy as a response to coordination challenges and emphasizes organization size and the need to transfer knowledge as the mainspring of these challenges. This connection, however, is largely based on the quantity of knowledge to be transferred rather than its characteristics. Building on the knowledge-based view, we propose that knowledge scope—the variety of knowledge across an organization's members—affects coordination costs and hierarchy expansion. Using an economy-wide database from Brazil, we show that firms are more likely to expand their hierarchy when knowledge scope increases. This effect varies with firms' capacities to manage knowledge; firms whose employees perform more similar tasks or have shared experience at previous employers are less likely to expand hierarchy in response to increases in knowledge scope.

Who benefits from the adoption of communication technology in the workplace? I combine worker-level wage data with information on broadband adoption by Brazilian firms to estimate the effects of broadband on wages and inequality. Overall, wages increase 2.2 percent following broadband adoption. Consistent with theories of biased technical change, wages increase the most for workers engaged in non-routine cognitive tasks and occupations that require using computer technology. Additionally, I estimate the effect of broadband on selected quantiles of the within-firm wage distribution to test predictions from theories of "management by exception" about the effects of communication technology on different levels of the organizational hierarchy. Consistent with theory, I find that upper-level employees benefit more than employees at lower levels. Furthermore, wage inequality among managers increases following broadband adoption, while inequality among workers decreases or is unchanged. Both new hires and firms' existing employees benefit from broadband adoption, which indicates that broadband's effects are not driven only by better recruitment of new employees.

Corporate political action committees donate about $300 million to federal political candidates each election cycle, but research offers mixed evidence as to the value of these contributions. We estimate the value of firms’ campaign contributions by studying the decision of 159 S&P 500 companies to stop donations following a riot in the U.S. Capitol building. Average cumulative abnormal returns over the two days following firms’ announcements to halt donations were −0.6 percent. There is no significant relationship between the magnitude of abnormal returns and (a) the amount of political contributions, (b) the intensity of regulation in a firm’s industry, (c) the firm’s lobbying expenditures, or (d) measures of ESG performance and political accountability. Analyses of campaign donations show that firms initially halted their political contributions as promised, but that many resumed giving by the end of 2021. Together, the results suggest campaign donations by corporate political action committees have small effects on firm value.

We examine to what extent and when multi-business firms internally redeploy workers between their units. Research has emphasized that resource redeployment creates value by allowing firms to escape from declining industries to those with better prospects. We find multiple patterns consistent with this mechanism. However, we also find, surprisingly, that more than half of all redeployments occur between establishments in the same five-digit industry. Moreover, redeployment is often not associated with business exit or diversification, but rather, the opening of new establishments in industries that are growing within the firm. We argue that these patterns are consistent with the theoretical notion of "internal inducements" to redeployment. Overall, our findings suggest redeployment creates value not only in the process of diversification but also horizontal growth.

Scarcity of productive factors poses a challenge for firms entering underdeveloped regions. We examine resource redeployment as a strategy to overcome scarcity in factor markets by modeling when expanding firms will internally redeploy versus hire workers via external markets. Our model predicts that redeployment is most valuable when there are large differences in resource scarcity across factor markets and when output is highly sensitive to worker skill and complementarities between labor and other resources. The ability to overcome resource scarcity allows firms with redeployment capabilities to enter markets that other firms would not. Data on sugar mills in Brazil, where a sudden demand boom incentivized expansion, corroborate the predictions. Our research identifies new entry advantages from resource redeployment.

CEOs increasingly engage in activism on controversial social and political issues, such as police reform, LGBTQ rights, and election law, to influence the behavior of policymakers. We run an experiment on 514 elected, local politicians to examine how CEO activism on police reform affects the views of policymakers. Additionally, we examine how CEOs' controversial positions on social issues affects politicians' willingness to privately meet with CEOs or publicly advocate for their businesses. We find that CEO support for specific police reform policies has no effect on policymakers' opinions. Policymakers, however, are much less willing to engage—either privately or publicly—with CEOs who take controversial positions on social issues. Our results suggest that CEO activism is a poor tool for influencing local politicians, at least on the topic of police reform, and underscore the business costs of CEOs taking political positions. We discuss the implications for CEOs and the activist groups that often pressure them to take public positions on controversial issues.

Economic theory is clear about the advantages and disadvantages of various ways of regulating negative externalities, such as command and control, cap and trade, taxation, subsidies, and tort law. Yet public policy rarely follows the recommendations that follow from the theory. For example, the standard recommendations for reducing CO₂ emissions involve carbon taxes or some form of cap and trade, but discussions of "realistic" ways to reduce emissions in the U.S. have involved mileage standards, command and control regulation of power plants, and tax subsidies for energy efficiency. In democracies such as the U.S., policies must have at least some public support. Citizens' limited understanding of the economics of regulation can lead to lack of support for optimal policies. In studies on the World Wide Web, we document some failures, and some successes, of ordinary citizens to think through the economics of alternative policies. Among other issues, we examine understanding of the secondary effects of taxation vs. subsidies, and understanding of the role of limited information (on the part of polluters, or governments) in the choice between command-and-control regulation and tort law or taxation.