This article examines the economic influence activities (EIAs) of firms. We argue that firms invest in jobs and establishments in districts of congressional committee members that have oversight over their businesses and industries. This investment increases as legislators’ power rises in Congress. Our theory makes three predictions. First, EIAs by firms will be higher in congressional districts where the legislators have substantial political influence over the firm, relative to districts where legislators have little influence over the firm. Second, EIAs will increase with the legislators’ power on the focal committee. Third, when a legislator exits the committee, EIAs will diminish, but previous investments in the district will remain. We test these predictions by analyzing the Trinet census of establishments, mapped into the committee structure of the US Congress, by tracking the investment and employment of firms in each industry in each congressional district over time. Using fixed-effects models, we show the predictions of the theory find substantial support in the US Senate but not the House. We explore causality by using exogenous exits of politicians by death and scandals to further complement our analysis, and discuss why EIAs may be less likely to occur and detect in the House.

Conventional viewpoints on global branding for design-focused consumer goods presuppose national identities as a given and prerequisite to market expansion, the key examples being Danish design furniture, Swiss watches, and Parisian fashion. Through the case study of Royal Selangor—a Malaysian family firm specializing in manufacturing pewter tableware and gifts—this study analyzes how businesses in former colonies adapt their branding strategies to transitioning ideas on national identities and economic development in the postcolonial era by drawing upon cosmopolitan worldviews of malleable identities and utilizing ties with former colonizers to gain cultural capital domestically and abroad. This study engages with theoretical frameworks of business history, organizational studies, and nationalism to explore how companies in developing countries in Southeast Asia that are also former colonies interact with colonial histories and participate in postcolonial nation-building through branding and entrepreneurship.

Having emerged from World War II as a permanent feature of American political and economic life, the “glamour” of research and development (R&D) would soon take hold of Wall Street. By the 1960s, shares of high-tech electronics and aerospace firms became irresistible to the flood of young men entering the securities business with the hopes of getting rich quick off capital gains. For this generation, R&D spending today came to mean earnings growth tomorrow, and in periods of financial hardship, executives under pressure to meet earnings expectations changed R&D accounting policies to boost their bottom lines. With this change, firms experiencing significant losses could maintain the appearance of profitability while reinforcing public perceptions of R&D as a magic bullet for growth. Contrary to the mythology of the “space age,” however, those intimately involved in R&D and tracking its costs insisted that expenditures so incurred failed in practice to qualify as assets. Drawing from arguments made by industrial researchers and cost accountants, this article problematizes the “R&D underinvestment” consensus that emerged in the wake of the space age and suggests dropping the R&D asset view wherever it circulates, including in academic scholarship.

Exposure to the marketing of ultra-processed food and beverages has been proven to be detrimental to children’s health. This article explores this issue from a business and human rights perspective, with the purpose of understanding businesses’ responsibilities and states’ duties with respect to the deliberate marketing of ultra-processed products to children. To this end, this article refers to the three pillars of the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, as well as to international human rights law. Its analysis looks not only at the normative content of obligations, responsibilities and rights under international law, but also at their implementation and at current challenges within the Latin American context.

In a sample of non-U.S. regulatory regime shifts, we find that expanded short selling is associated with stock price declines, reductions in capital expenditure, and lower asset growth. In a reversal of results found for U.S. stocks in a study of Regulation SHO by Grullon, Michenaud, and Weston (2015), our results are stronger for large firms than for small firms. We also show that this investment effect is stronger for firms that previously relied on outside financing. Our results suggest that short-sale policies affect corporate investment and that this effect is not driven by capital constraints.

We present a dynamic, continuous-time model in which risk averse inside equityholders set a bank’s lending, payout, and financing policies, and the exposure of bank assets to crashes. We examine whether bailouts encourage excessive lending and risk taking compared to liquidation or bail-ins with debt-to-equity conversion or debt write-downs. The effects of the prevailing insolvency resolution mechanism (IRM) on the probability of insolvency, loss in default, and the bank’s value suggest no single IRM is a panacea. We show how a bailout fund financed through a tax on bank dividends resolves bailouts without public money and without distorting insiders’ incentives.

We examine the costs of trading restrictions by exploiting an SEC rule change eliminating an approximately 80-day restriction period in private placements for small issuers. Using a difference-in-differences specification, we find that the restriction is binding, as dollar volume increases 19 percentage points vis-à-vis proceeds, and costly, as offering discounts fall by 8 percentage points. Discounts fall more for issuers with higher information asymmetry or longer restriction periods. We account for endogenous responses to the rule change. Overall, our findings suggest that trading restrictions are costly and have large effects on firms’ cost of capital.

This article examines the effectiveness of cooperation among bank supervisors using novel data on supranational agreements signed by 93 countries. Exploiting that globally operating banks are differently covered by these agreements, we show that supervisory cooperation generally improves bank stability. The magnitude of the effect is higher for smaller global banks, and when supervisors are more stringent and have access to higher quality information. We also show that actual supervisory cooperation varies across countries consistent with differences in economic costs and benefits of cooperation. This suggests that cooperation is not always desirable, despite being effective in reducing bank risk.

Which factors make some American multinational corporations (MNCs) take political action in response to the US–China Trade War and cause others to stay on the sidelines? We identify China-based subsidiaries of US firms to identify firms’ political actions in response to the trade war. We combine data on firms’ tariff exposure, economic actions in China, and political actions in the United States during the trade war. Together these data highlight the divergent strategies with which firms engage. Even though more than 63 percent of MNCs in our sample were adversely impacted by tariffs, only 22 percent voice opposition and 7 percent exit in response to the trade war. Our analysis reveals that US MNCs in China differ in their business models, ownership structure, experience in China, and size of capital investments. These firm-level factors determine the degree to which US MNCs are embedded in China. This in turn shapes how firms perceive political risk and choose from the menu of options to deal with the trade war. Size and age increase voice while joint-venture status decreases it.

We document distinctly different clientele effects on investor attention and return responses to information. Macro news crowds out retail investor attention to firms’ earnings news by 49%. For stocks with high retail ownership, macro news dampens earnings announcement returns by 17% and substantially increases post-announcement drift, especially during high VIX periods. In contrast, macro news increases institutional investor attention to scheduled earnings announcements but not their attention to unscheduled analysts’ forecast revisions. The findings confirm the implications of rational inattention models and highlight the importance of considering clientele effects in understanding the effect of news on attention and asset prices.