Research

In new research, Seong Jin Ahn, Jared N. Jennings, and Yanrong Jia find that SEC enforcement against insider trading does not deter subsequent insider trading so much as displace it to other actors in the same industry.

The United States has relaxed campaign finance laws over the past few decades. As a result, there exist concerns about politicians favoring special business interests over the welfare of other constituents, such as workers. In a new paper, Pat Akey, Tania Babina, Greg Buchak, and Ana-Maria Tenekedjieva examine how the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission affected earnings for firms and workers, as well as political turnover and polarization at the state level.

In new research, Christian Peukert and Margaritha Windisch review how copyright laws and practices have evolved to adapt to new technologies and discuss the various issues scholars and policymakers must address as copyright law is once again forced to adapt to the emergence of artificial intelligence.

In new research, Matthias Breuer, Anthony Le, and Felix Vetter find that when companies are required by the government to seek a third-party financial audit, they turn to lower quality auditors.  As a result, the accounting industry grows, but touted benefits for markets and corporate stakeholders appear elusive.

Due to a change in how the FDIC resolves failed banks, uninsured deposits have become de facto insured. Not only is this dangerous for risk in the banking system, it is not what Congress intends the FDIC to do, writes Michael Ohlrogge.

In new research, Valentino Larcinese and Alberto Parmigiani find that the 1986 Reagan tax cuts led to greater campaign spending from wealthy individuals, who benefited the most from this policy. The authors argue that a very permissive system of political finance, combined with the erosion of tax progressivity, created the conditions for the mutual reinforcement of economic and political disparities. The result was an inequality spiral hardly compatible with democratic ideals.

Many financial commentators thought that the surge of retail investors participating in the stock market, the most notable of whom boosted “meme stocks” like GameStop, would democratize corporate governance and improve prosocial firm behavior, including the promotion of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals. In new research, Dhruv Aggarwal, Albert H. Choi, and Yoon-Ho Alex Lee find evidence that the exact opposite took place.

Does an inventor’s political identity influence their productivity? In a new paper, Joseph Engelberg, Runjing Lu, William Mullins, and Richard Townsend examine the impacts of the 2008 and 2016 United States presidential elections on Democrat and Republican inventors, with a particular focus on the quantity and quality of patents after the country elects a new president.

The effectiveness of tax policy depends on whether sellers pass on changes in tax rates to consumers through changes in price. In new research, Felix Montag, Robin Mamrak, Alina Sagimuldina, and Monika Schnitzer investigate how this tax pass-through in turn depends on how much consumers know about prices. They show that if consumers are not aware of how prices for the same product vary between sellers, then they will be unaffected by tax changes intended to increase or decrease consumption.

In new research, Matthew C. Ringgenberg, Chong Shu, and Ingrid M. Werner ask if academic research exhibits political slants. They develop a new measure of the political slant of research and study how it varies by discipline, demographics, and the political party of the sitting United States president. Finally, they show that their measure is related to the researchers' personal political ideology, suggestive of an ideological echo chamber in social science research.