Smartphones regularly track the precise locations of millions of people worldwide. These data are increasingly used in both industry and academic settings to measure firm performance, workplace behavior, and other metrics. We demystify this rich source of data and explain how these data are constructed, how researchers can obtain access, and best practices when making inferences. Additionally, we review recent examples of management and strategy research that rely on smartphone location data, highlighting opportunities and limitations of using these data for research.

CEOs increasingly engage in activism on controversial social and political issues, such as police reform, LGBTQ+ rights, and gun control, to influence the behavior of policymakers. We run an experiment on 514 local, elected politicians to examine how revealing information about CEO activism on police reform affects the views of policymakers. Additionally, we examine how CEOs' controversial positions on social issues affect politicians' willingness to privately meet with CEOs or publicly advocate for their businesses. We do not find that revealing CEO support for specific police reform policies affects policymakers' opinions. Policymakers, however, are much less willing to engage—either privately or publicly—with CEOs who take controversial positions on social issues. These results do not vary with local economic conditions or the salience of police reform, but appear to be driven by policymakers' personal, ideological commitments. Our results suggest that CEO activism may have limited influence on 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.

CEOs increasingly engage in activism on issues such as gun control, voting rights, and abortion. Although such activism may benefit their firms, the stated goal is often to mobilize the public and precipitate change. In an experiment with 4,578 respondents, we study the effect of CEO activism on people's willingness to contact their U.S. senators about abortion. On average, showing a CEO message supporting abortion rights is not more effective at mobilizing pro-choice citizens than showing no message or showing a message from other speakers. Additionally, CEOs do not provoke countermobilization by people who oppose abortion. We explore heterogeneous treatment effects and find that CEO activism is better at motivating pro-choice citizens to engage in politics when their senators are Democrats and thus likely receptive to pro-choice activism, consistent with stakeholder alignment theory. Our findings contribute to research on leadership ethics and democracy by examining the ability of CEOs and organizations to foster engagement in the democratic process.

Scarcity of productive factors poses a challenge for firms entering underdeveloped regions. We theorize that incumbent firms can overcome scarcity of skilled human capital in local labor markets by redeploying workers from existing units. We predict that redeployment is more valuable when factor markets exhibit large differences in resource scarcity. Redeployment is also more valuable when output is highly sensitive to worker skill and is responsive to complementarities between labor and other inputs. Important implications are that redeployment can endow firms with superior resources and enable them to enter more markets. Data on sugar mills in Brazil, where a sudden demand boom incentivized expansion, corroborate the predictions. Our research identifies a new mechanism of value-creation from resource redeployment across factor markets.

We examine to what extent and when multi-unit firms internally redeploy managers between units. While theory has emphasized how changes in demand conditions affect redeployment, we argue that optimal internal resource allocation involves consideration of both demand and each unit's resource supply. We formalize this argument, showing how redeployment arises from "supply-side inducements"—return advantages in new over existing resource uses resulting from changes in resource supply. Empirical tests using manager deaths as an exogenous, supply-side shock to firms' resource stocks support our arguments, showing that firms frequently redeploy resources away from better-endowed and toward negatively affected units. Incorporating supply-side inducements into redeployment theory implies additional value-creation opportunities from redeployment and carries novel predictions for the direction of intra-firm resource flows.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Efficient intra-firm resource allocation and redeployment positively affect firm performance, but we lack evidence of what firm characteristics enable redeployment. This paper examines the role of organizational structure, in particular, whether decision-making authority is centralized or decentralized, on worker redeployment following establishment closures in Brazilian manufacturing firms. Using a triple-difference research design, we find that centralized firms are more likely to redeploy workers out of closing establishments than decentralized firms. An analysis of mechanisms suggests that the redeployment “advantage” is reduced in centralized firms facing greater information frictions and in decentralized firms with stronger firm-level incentives; we find no evidence that it is moderated by stronger organizational control mechanisms. For workers, redeployment mitigates the negative effects of closure, shielding them from sharp spikes in unemployment and persistent earnings losses. These benefits are larger for workers in more centralized firms, suggesting that following closures, centralized firms are better at matching workers to opportunities elsewhere in the firm.

CEO political activism on an issue can shape how individuals perceive a CEO's views on that issue. Moreover, such activism can prompt individuals to update their perceptions of the CEO's stance on other social-political issues and their assessments of the company's work environment. In a pre-registered experiment, we examine how exposure to CEO activism influences individuals' beliefs about both the CEO and the company's work environment. Our findings indicate that individuals adjust their beliefs about the CEO's views on the focal and other social-political issues in alignment with the CEO's stance. Additionally, they revise their perceptions of the company's work environment. Liberal activism generates favorable inferences about the workplace, whereas conservative activism is associated with unfavorable inferences. These inferences significantly affect organizational attraction and demonstrate how CEO activism can influence stakeholder behavior through both political and nonpolitical channels. Overall, the results extend theory by underscoring the nuanced and constrained ways individuals update their beliefs about CEOs and firms following activism.

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.

Firms' and executives' stances on controversial issues affect consumer behavior. This “political consumerism” might be motivated by ideology and a desire to signal to peers, and thus vary for private and public purchases. We conduct an experiment with 1,198 consumers to study how purchase visibility affects responses to CEO activism. Participants are randomly shown either generic product information or that plus a CEO statement supporting gun rights. They then choose between receiving the product or cash, with half assigned to a condition where their choice is visible to someone they know. We find that CEO activism reduces demand among people who disagree with the CEO regardless of purchase visibility, indicating minimal signaling motives. Our results have implications for firms using politics to differentiate products.

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.

Employee misconduct presents a significant challenge for companies worldwide, with global losses estimated at 5% of annual revenues due to internal fraud. According to agency theory, employee misconduct arises from misaligned interests of employees with the organization. Traditional solutions to align interests, such as monetary incentives, have shown limited effectiveness in preventing misconduct, which is why recently scholars have proposed relationship-based measures instead. Drawing from agency theory and the stakeholder alignment model, we propose that corporate activism, especially authentic activism, can serve as another effective relationship-based governance tool to align employee interests with organizational goals and reduce misconduct. We examine its effectiveness in a natural field experiment, but in contrast to theory, find that employees are indifferent to authentic activism. Yet, employees penalize inauthentic efforts, leading to reduced job satisfaction and increased misconduct. We find evidence that this negative effect is reduced when employees have a strong identification with the organization prior to being exposed to inauthentic corporate activism. Contrary to expectations from corporate activism literature and theory, employees' political orientation does not influence their reactions to such activism. Our findings contribute to the stakeholder model of CEO activism by demonstrating that political alignment or misalignment is not always the determining factor in driving positive or negative stakeholder responses. Instead, the organizational identification prior to the activist event as well as the type of stakeholder group may also play a significant role.