This article studies the making of return predictability among economically linked firms. I characterize an asymmetric cross-firm tug-of-war: i) High peer overnight returns are followed by elevated overnight returns for focal stocks, which fully reverse during intraday, and ii) high peer intraday returns are followed by high intraday returns but minor overnight price reactions. This pattern aligns with the story that individuals’ persistent trading on salient information distorts opening prices, while slow-moving arbitrage by professional investors gradually corrects mispricing. Mutual fund and hedge fund flows exhibit distinct associations with the tug-of-war, supporting the hypothesis that heterogeneous demand drives the return predictability.

While almost all charities rely on a set of donor appreciation strategies, their effectiveness for the success of fundraising campaigns is underresearched. Through two preregistered field studies conducted in collaboration with a leading German opera house (N = 10,000), we explore the significance of expressing gratitude and examine two different approaches to doing so. Our first study investigates the impact of a ‘thank you in advance’ statement in fundraising letters, a common strategy among fundraisers. In the second study, we explore the effectiveness of handwritten thankyou postcards versus printed postcards, shedding light on the roles of personalization and handwriting in donor appeals. Our findings challenge conventional wisdom, revealing that neither ‘thank you in advance’ nor handwritten thank you notes significantly affect donor contributions.

Is the formation of venture capital (VC) markets a national phenomenon? Against the common view that VC emerged in the US in the post-WWII period and later (yet independently) in Europe, we argue that the uneven relation between US and UK VC markets was crucial for British VC formation since the 1980s. Based on an empirical analysis of secondary literature and financial data, the article demonstrates that this relation is better understood through the lens of international financial subordination and identifies three types of dependencies to qualify this relation: the dependencies of UK VC on US start-up investments, US growth capital, and US exit deals. This type of financial subordination is specific to ‘alternative finance’, because highly profitable VC exits kick-started a flywheel effect in UK VC in the 2000s, and the subsequent expansion of British VC went hand in hand with a concentration of capital because UK VC followed a ‘winners-take-all’ logic that is characteristic of alt-finance in general. This suggests, counterintuitively, that after UK VC formed, the US economy benefitted more in financial, economic, and technological terms from the growing British VC market than its UK counterpart mainly because most large exit deals took place in the US.

2024 marked ten years since the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) took effect. Firmly rooted in international human rights and humanitarian law, the ATT is the first legally binding instrument to regulate international arms transfers. It is a framework for national action to (i) contribute to peace and security, (ii) reduce human suffering caused by irresponsible arms transfers and (iii) promote transparency in the international arms trade. This piece exploresrecent developments in the ATT process that represent a pivot from building treaty infrastructure toward more expansive stakeholder engagement, increased information exchange centred on state practice and a sharper focus on the ATT’s human impact. Key new features are discussions on actual arms transfer decisions and the examination of the independent human rights responsibilities of industry that operate alongside government risk assessment obligations. Finally, this piece assesses the potential impact of these efforts on the achievement of the ATT’s humanitarian purpose.

Our research reviews theory and evidence in the economics literature to provide a standard value of a statistical life (VSL) applicable to the Department of Defense (DOD). We follow Viscusi (Best estimate selection bias in the value of a statistical life, Journal of Benefit-Cost Analysis, 9(2), 205–246, 2018a) by conducting a meta-analysis of 1,025 VSL estimates from 68 different labor market studies and find a best-set average VSL estimate of $11.8 million (US$2021) across all studies. For DOD analysts and practitioners, we advocate using our best-set VSL estimate for the vast majority of benefit–cost analyses (BCAs) within the DOD. In addition to providing a VSL benchmark to use in DOD BCAs, we disaggregate casualty types and provide a range of VSL estimates to use in sensitivity analyses. Employing restricted data from the DOD on over 6,700 US military fatalities in Afghanistan and Iraq from 2001 to 2021, we show that (1) fatalities are highly concentrated among young, White and enlisted males, and that (2) the Army and Marines account for the vast majority of the fatality totals (73 and 22%, respectively), in contrast to the low number of fatalities (<5%) in the Air Force and Navy. The monetized cost of US military fatalities in Afghanistan and Iraq would involve individual VSL levels that range from $3.2 to $27.6 million per statistical life (US$2021), after applying standard pay grade and income adjustments.

Political polarization is a group phenomenon in which opposing factions, often of unequal size, exhibit asymmetrical influence and behavioral patterns. Within these groups, elites and masses operate under different motivations and levels of influence, challenging simplistic views of polarization. Yet, existing methods for measuring polarization in social networks typically reduce it to a single value, assuming homogeneity in polarization across the entire system. While such approaches confirm the rise of political polarization in many social contexts, they overlook structural complexities that could explain its underlying mechanisms. We propose a method that decomposes existing polarization and alignment measures into distinct components. These components separately capture polarization processes involving elites and masses from opposing groups. Applying this method to Twitter discussions surrounding the 2019 and 2023 Finnish parliamentary elections, we find that (1) opposing groups rarely have a balanced contribution to observed polarization, and (2) while elites strongly contribute to structural polarization and consistently display greater alignment across various topics, the masses, too, have recently experienced a surge in alignment. Our method provides an improved analytical lens through which to view polarization, explicitly recognizing the complexity of and need to account for elite-mass dynamics in polarized environments.

Reverse auctions, also known as procurement auctions, are used in various fields by public or corporate buyers to purchase goods and services from multiple sellers at the best price. Unlike in selling auctions, in reverse auctions a budget constraint rather than a target quantity is often announced by the auctioneer. However, in auction theory no equilibrium bidding strategy has yet been found in the case when a budget constraint is announced. Here we compare the two auction formats in an online experiment with 329 participants. We use the strategy method to obtain participants’ bidding strategies from which we run exhaustive simulations of auction outcomes to define equivalent target and budget constraints. This original methodology allows to overcome the issue of randomness of the auction outcome related to bidders’ values and to compare the two formats in a rigorous way. When each bidder has a single unit to sell, from the buyer’s perspective, we find that, on average, the budget-constrained auction format outperforms the target-constrained auction format.

While the idea of predistribution is gaining traction, it may seem inherently elusive. The source of confusion is the prefix ‘pre’, which denotes priority or prevention. This paper proposes a new functional definition of predistribution that is practically useful and unifies different predistributive policies. Through defending predistribution as policies of ex ante distribution, I offer a philosophically robust notion of priority (‘procedural priority’) and different functions of prevention that help make sense of predistribution. I also develop typologies of different predistributive policies and explore justificatory grounds and strengths of predistribution. I emphasize instrumental reasons for supporting predistribution.

This study sheds light on the diffusion of knowledge production as an institutional norm among central, development, and investment banks. It builds on an original database of 24,435 peer-reviewed scientific items published by a pool of 237 central banks, development banks, and investment banks from 1966 to 2023. The focus is on their interactive dynamics, analysed through a two-fold approach: Granger-Causality analysis for linear relationships and a multivariate Markov chain approach for non-linear interactions. Central banks emerge as leaders in scientific production, influencing development and investment banks. Results lead to further questions about inter-institutional agenda-setting, such as how central banks shape research priorities, the extent to which their intellectual leadership impacts others’ priorities, and the mechanisms through which institutional norms are diffused and reinforced within the global financial and policymaking landscape.

This editorial examines the empirical foundations of Chinese management research through an analysis of data sources and research designs in all empirical papers published in Management and Organization Review (MOR) over the past five years. Our review shows that 53.2% of studies rely on archival or secondary data, with 37% of quantitative studies focusing on publicly listed firms. While established datasets provide consistency and comparability, their prevalence may limit opportunities to explore China’s diverse organizational ecosystem. We identify three promising avenues for advancing the field: (1) expanding empirical attention to include a wider variety of organizational forms, (2) leveraging emerging computational methods, digital trace data, and AI-enabled technologies, and (3) recognizing the development of novel datasets as valuable scholarly contributions in their own right. We also examine how recent regulatory developments are creating new considerations for research design while reinforcing the value of collaborative approaches between international and Chinese scholars. We contend that by embracing methodological pluralism and adapting to evolving data landscapes, management scholars can generate additional novel insights that illuminate the complexity and distinctiveness of Chinese organizational life.

The digital transformation of Chinese companies offers a new frontier for organizational research. Widespread use of workplace platforms creates rich archives of unobtrusive data, providing continuous, real-time insights into organizational life that traditional surveys cannot capture. The central challenge for scholars is turning this data abundance into meaningful theory. This special issue highlights three studies that meet this challenge by using innovative methods to convert granular data into valuable knowledge. The papers employ digital-context experiments, real-time behavioral tracking, and machine-learning-assisted theory building to study phenomena from interpersonal dynamics to crisis productivity. Looking ahead, we explore the potential of unstructured multimodal data and new AI tools to make complex analysis more accessible. We conclude with a research agenda calling for methodological rigor, interdisciplinary collaboration, and a firm balance between technological innovation and theoretical depth.

Why some chief executive officers (CEOs) pursue risk-taking at the firm level while others favor caution remains a foundational question in management. We adopt the microfoundations perspective to tackle this question. As we examine the impact of CEO origin on firm risk-taking, we further investigate how CEO origin interacts with contingencies – temporal orientation and cognitive focus – to shape firm risk-taking. We assert that outsider CEOs are more likely to pursue risk-taking, while such an effect is attenuated by the temporal orientation of short-termism, and reinforced by the temporal orientation of long-termism and the cognitive focus of broader attention. Using a 20-year panel dataset of the S&P top 100 firms, we offer insights into firm risk-taking particularly under the conditions that better explain why CEOs could differ in firm risk-taking. By linking executive characteristics to behavioral context from the microfoundations perspective, we offer an integrated framework of firm risk-taking.

This paper examines the impact of Sunday blue law reforms on small-scale wineries in the United States. Using establishment-level data from 2000 to 2020, we employ an event-study framework to analyze the impact of changes in Sunday alcohol sales regulations across states on the performance of small wineries. We find that deregulation is associated with substantial declines in the performance of small wineries. On average, sales fell by 25.5%, employment declined by 7.8%, and survival rates dropped by 5.2% following the repeal of Sunday sales restrictions. These adverse effects are particularly pronounced among the smallest wineries and those located in metropolitan counties. The results suggest that while deregulation increased consumer access to alcohol on Sundays, it also intensified competition from large-scale retail outlets, thereby undermining the direct-to-consumer sales channels that are critical to small wine producers.

This article introduces a blockchain-based insurance scheme that integrates parametric and collaborative elements. A pool of investors, referred to as surplus providers, locks funds in a smart contract, enabling blockchain users to underwrite parametric insurance contracts. These contracts automatically trigger compensation when predefined conditions are met. The collaborative aspect is embodied in the generation of tokens, which are distributed to surplus providers. These tokens represent each participant’s share of the surplus and grant voting rights for management decisions. The smart contract is developed in Solidity, a high-level programming language for the Ethereum blockchain, and deployed on the Sepolia testnet, with data processing and analysis conducted using Python. In addition, open-source code is provided and main research challenges are identified, so that further research can be carried out to overcome limitations of this first proof of concept.

In this study, we provide ex post empirical analysis of the effects of climate policies on carbon emissions at the aggregate national level, using a comprehensive database of 121 countries. Carbon taxes and emissions trading systems (ETS), and the overall stringency of climate policies are considered. We use dynamic panel regressions, controlling for macroeconomic factors (economic development, GDP growth, urbanisation and the energy mix). Higher carbon taxes and ETS prices reduce carbon emissions. An increase in carbon taxes by $10 per ton of CO2 reduces CO2 emissions per capita by 1.3% in the short run and by 4.6% in the long run.

This paper investigates the stability of the demand for money in the United States and provides a comparison among the simple-sum monetary aggregates, the original (non-credit-card-augmented) Divisia monetary aggregates, and the credit-augmented Divisia and credit-augmented Divisia inside aggregates. We use quarterly data from the Center for Financial Stability and the Pesaran et al. (2001) bounds test procedure to investigate the long-run relation between the monetary aggregates and their respective user costs. In doing so, we use three classic money demand functions—the log–log, the semi-log, and the Selden and Latané specifications. With quarterly data over the 1967:q1 through 2025:q1 period, for which the original Divisia monetary aggregates are available, we find evidence of a stable money demand function only with the Sum M4 aggregate under all money demand specifications, but not with any of the Divisia aggregates. With quarterly data over the post-2006 period, for which the credit-augmented Divisia monetary aggregates are also available, our findings show that the demand for money is stable across all money demand specifications with all of the original Divisia aggregates and the credit-augmented Divisia aggregates (but not with all of the credit-augmented Divisia inside aggregates). We also find evidence of cointegration with the Sum M3 and Sum M4 aggregates under all three money demand specifications, but not with the Fed’s Sum M2 aggregate.