This paper examines how firms’ exposure to physical climate risk affects innovative human capital. Inventors are more likely to leave as their employers become more exposed to climate shocks. Inventors departing firms with rising exposure tend to join less-exposed employers. The departure response reflects employer-level exposure rather than shocks confined to inventors’ own locations. Consistent with a career-concern channel, greater climate exposure predicts persistently slower R&D growth, and departing inventors sort toward firms with stronger innovative environments. The resulting reallocation is economically consequential: more exposed firms lose highly productive and valuable inventors, and inventor departures are followed by deterioration in subsequent innovation outcomes.
This paper shows that firms value liability maturity opacity when selecting funding sources in their debt structure. Such opacity may protect proprietary information about project timelines and enable strategic management of disclosures to lenders. Exploiting FASB ASC 842's mandatory lease maturity disclosure requirements as a plausibly exogenous shock, I document how losing maturity opacity affects firms' financing decisions. Isolating the maturity opacity channel from balance sheet recognition effects, I find that following the policy announcement, firms with higher pre-policy maturity opacity significantly reduce their lease usage by 0.9 percentage points (36% of the sample mean). The reduction concentrates in long-term leases, which were previously the most opaque in maturity structure. They also decrease their reliance on bank credit lines, consistent with avoiding heightened scrutiny from better-informed creditors. Consistent with the economic model of leases in Eisfeldt and Rampini (2009), these firms increase secured debt usage by 7.5 percentage points (19.7% of the sample mean) after implementation of the policy. These effects are stronger among firms with low analyst coverage, among financially constrained firms, and in competitive industries, where maturity opacity is more valuable. The findings document firms' preference for liability maturity opacity and reveal a new mechanism through which lease accounting reform shapes debt structure.
We study how judicial independence affects the stability of corporate supply chains, exploiting the staggered, city-level rollout of China’s vertical management reform of local courts in a difference-in-differences design. The reform lowers the churn of firms’ top suppliers and customers and lengthens their longest-standing relationships. This average masks a reallocation margin: after the reform, firms with greater hold-up exposure replace partners more often than other firms, consistent with enforcement-enabled reallocation. Stabilization is stronger where partner relationships are less publicly visible and among firms with more transparent accounting or greater analyst coverage, and duration gains are larger for financially constrained firms. The reform also raises total factor productivity and extends the geographic reach of supply chains. Impartial enforcement thus shapes both the durability of firm-to-firm relationships and the reallocation of partners.
Private communications between managers and sell-side analysts are widespread yet are largely unobservable to outside market participants. This study constructs a measure of face-to-face private communication between managers and sell-side analysts by mapping New York City (NYC) taxi trip records to company headquarters and brokerage locations of NYC analysts. Focusing on earnings announcements, where demands for such communication is particularly high, we find that abnormal ride volumes following earnings announcements are associated with analyst- and firm-level consequences. At the analyst-level, abnormal ride increases are associated with more accurate forecasts, with stronger effects when earnings news is more uncertain or unexpected, consistent with interpretive role of private communications. Also, abnormal ride increases are associated with timely earnings forecasts, more profitable stock recommendations, and forecast revisions that elicit stronger market reactions without subsequent drift. At the firm level, companies with greater taxi activity by forecast-issuing analysts exhibit stock prices more reflective of future earnings and larger reductions in forecast dispersion and bid-ask spreads. Overall, the findings suggest that private communications help analysts produce timely and precise public signals about firms' future earnings that translate into broader benefits for firm-level information environments and price efficiency.
This paper examines how bank loans evolve following unexpected deposit flows. Using bank-level U.S. commercial banks' data, we show that while large banks' lending is largely unaffected, loans at small banks significantly change after deposit shocks. Furthermore, the extent of this change among small banks depends on their exposure to off-balance-sheet liquidity risk, proxied by the level of unused commitments. Small banks with higher off-balance sheet exposures tend to extend fewer new loans following positive deposit shocks, suggesting that liquidity absorbed from the failure of other banks or market disruptions might not as easily be lent again to borrowers. Overall, these findings emphasize how off-balance-sheet risks can constrain the credit supply channel, even in the presence of liquidity surpluses.
