What are we paid for? The determinants of business faculty pay (with Daniel Bradley, April Knill, and Jared Williams)
We examine the determinants of business school faculty pay, using detailed data on compensation, research, teaching, and administrative service. We estimate that a top-tier journal publication is worth $116,000, with significant variation across disciplines. Second-tier publications are worth one-third as much, and other publications have no impact. Further analysis of salaries and cross-discipline publication records suggests that researchers are compensated based on the journals they publish in rather than the departments they belong to. Conference presentations and teaching evaluations have significant but smaller effects than top-tier publications. Faculty administrators earn a premium, with department chairs receiving 11–35% and deans 58-94%. Post-Covid-19, real faculty pay has fallen more than in comparable fields and the sensitivity of pay to research performance has weakened.
The Changing Landscape of Corporate Governance Disclosure: Impact on Shareholder Voting (with David Becher and Jared Wilson)
We find that firms increasingly voluntarily adopt director skills matrices. Consistent with these image-based disclosures decreasing investors’ costs of evaluating director expertise, matrices lead to higher director vote support, particularly among cases where directors’ contribution to the firm was less clear. However, following poor performance, firms are more likely to utilize matrices to window dress director skills, and non-attentive investors are less likely to see through such behavior. Benefits of matrices are greatest among firms with less window dressing and with more incremental information relative to the director bios, as measured in terms of director retention and new board seats.
Environmental Lobbying Innovation and the Green Transition, (with Sungjoung Kwon and Michela Verardo)
The competitive challenges and regulatory uncertainty associated with the green transition incentivize firms to both innovate and influence environmental policy. While much attention has focused on green innovation, we examine firms’ lobbying choices. We develop a method to identify “green” and “brown” environmental lobbying. We find that firms’ lobbying is not aligned with their innovation efforts: many green innovators engage in significant brown lobbying. The direction of environmental lobbying is an informative signal of firms’ true environmental stances and predicts real actions, such as emissions. Despite the informativeness of lobbying, neither environmental ratings nor UNPRI signatories’ investments incorporate this signal.
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Corporate Lobbying of Bureaucrats (with Ekaterina Volkova)
Although lobbying of Congress receives much attention, government agencies control many key decisions. We examine companies’ interactions with these agencies. First, companies extensively lobby agencies. Second, we exploit unique agency procedures to precisely measure benefits from this lobbying: companies earn higher returns around new rulemaking and face lighter enforcements following investigations. Third, since agencies don't depend on campaign contributions, we examine what incentivizes them to favor certain companies: regulatory capture and the revolving door play significant roles. Fourth, following a negative exogenous shock to agency power, the Supreme Court’s Chevron decision, firms engaged in agency lobbying experienced negative abnormal returns.