Columbia Business School Research

Many organizations rely on formal management control systems that align employee values with organizational values (i.e., culture-fit) to shape organizational culture. Using proprietary data from a highly-decentralized organization, I examine the employee performance consequences of adopting a formal culture-fit measurement system in employee selection. I exploit the staggered feature of the adoption of the system, and find that employees selected with the system perform significantly better than those without the system.

This paper recasts the consumption asset pricing model in terms of observable accounting outcomes by recognizing accounting principles that connect those outcomes to consumption and the risk to consumption. The model prompts the construction of a pricing factor from observed accounting information. The factor performs well relative to extant factors in explaining cross-sectional returns. Further, it delivers out-of-sample expected returns that forecast the actual returns and the forward betas that investors actually experience.

We use supervisory loan-level data to document that small firms (SMEs) obtain shorter maturity credit lines than large firms, post more collateral, have higher utilization rates, and pay higher spreads. We rationalize these facts as the equilibrium outcome of a trade-off between lender commitment and discretion. Using the COVID recession, we test the prediction that SMEs are subject to greater lender discretion. Consistent with this hypothesis, SMEs did not draw down whereas large firms did, even in response to similar demand shocks.

We investigate the impact of reporting regulation on corporate innovation. Exploiting thresholds in Europe’s regulation and a major enforcement reform in Germany, we find that forcing firms to publicly disclose their financial statements discourages innovative activities. Our evidence suggests that reporting regulation has significant real effects by imposing proprietary costs on innovative firms, which in turn diminish their incentives to innovate.

We investigate the impact of uneven transparency regulation across countries and industries on the location of economic activity. Using two distinct sources of regulatory variation—the varying extent of financial-reporting requirements and the staggered introduction of electronic business registers in Europe—, we consistently document that direct exposure to transparency regulation is negatively associated with the focal industry’s economic activity in terms of inputs (e.g., employment) and outputs (e.g., production).

This paper investigates, theoretically and empirically, the effects of liquidity regulation on the banking system. We document that the current quantity-based liquidity rule has reduced banks' liquidity risks. However, the mandated liquidity buffer appears to crowd out bank lending and lead to a migration of liquidity risks to banks that are not subject to liquidity regulation. These findings motivate a model of liquidity regulation with endogenous liquidity premium and heterogeneous banks.

This article provides an applied introduction to Bartik instruments. The instruments attempt to reduce familiar endogeneity concerns in differential exposure designs (e.g., panel regressions with unit and time fixed effects). They isolate treatment variation due to the differential impact of common shocks on units with distinct pre-determined exposures. As a result, the instruments purge the treatment variation of possibly confounding factors varying across units over time.

How should an investor value financial data? The answer is complicated as it not only depends on the investor himself but also on the characteristics of all other investors. Portfolio size, risk aversions, trading horizon, and investment style affect an investor's willingness to pay for data and the equilibrium value of data. Directly measuring all these characteristics of all investors is hopeless. Thus, we outline a simple model that gives rise to sufficient statistics that make an investor's private value of data measurable.

A two-factor model explains returns for a variety of test portfolios, including those based of CAPM beta and those underlying factors in extant pricing models. The two-factor model involves the market factor and a factor based on firms’ fundamentals that has the feature of providing a hedge in down markets and a reverse-hedge in up markets. For a wide range of test portfolios, returns are described by sensitivity to the market factor with a beta of one and positions in the hedging factor.

We explore the landscape of public company auditing around the introduction of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in 1934. Using a broad sample of historical annual reports spanning several decades, we document that most public companies obtained audits even before the SEC’s audit mandate, which limited the mandate’s impact on audit rates. We further document that these companies selected their auditors based on characteristics reflecting independence and competence, even before the SEC’s mandate.

We predict and find that regulated firms' mandatory disclosures crowd out unregulated firms' voluntary disclosures. Consistent with information spillovers from regulated to unregulated firms, we document that unregulated firms reduce their own disclosures in the presence of regulated firms' disclosures. We further find that unregulated firms reduce their disclosures more the greater the strength of the regulatory information spillovers.