Banks open more branches and make more lending near their CEOs’ childhood hometowns. The effects are stronger among informationally opaque borrowers and among CEOs who spend more time in their childhood hometowns. Furthermore, loans originated near CEOs’ hometowns contain more soft information and have lower ex post default rates, implying that hometown loans are more informed. Hometown lending does not affect aggregate bank outcomes, suggesting that credit is being reallocated from regions located farther away to regions proximate to bank CEOs’ hometowns.

This article examines the Detroit Housewives League (DHL) in the 1930s and 1940s, concentrating on DHL members’ actions as businesswomen. Past narratives have framed the DHL as an extension of the black women’s club movement or as part of the women-driven consumer movements of the 1930s and 1940s, particularly highlighting the organization’s philosophies on black women’s purchasing power. I argue that entrepreneurial DHL women brought prior business knowledge to their organizing and were significant business experts and leaders. By conducting business research, forging community networks, and, significantly, establishing commercial colleges and other forms of business education in the city, DHL members’ work was vital for the black business community as a whole and for women entrepreneurs in particular. In reframing the DHL as an organization established by black entrepreneurial women, I suggest scholars should reevaluate black women’s contributions to other forms of activism in order to recover additional histories of black women’s entrepreneurship and business leadership.

Firms with greater shareholder rights have a greater risk-shifting incentive, requiring more lender monitoring. Thus, a reduction in shareholder rights implies more diffused (less monitoring-intensive) loan syndicates. Using the passage of U.S. second-generation antitakeover laws as an exogenous shock that reduces shareholder rights as a natural experiment, we find that loan syndicates become significantly more diffuse after the passage of these laws. These results are confirmed in a large sample of bank loans made during the 1990–2007 period when the loan syndicate market matured. Our results show how corporate governance causally affects financial contracting and creditor control in firms.

We show that the dividend growth rate implied by the options market is informative about i) the expected dividend growth rate and ii) the expected dividend risk premium. We model the expected dividend risk premium and explore its implications for the predictability of dividend growth and stock market returns. Correcting for the expected dividend risk premium strengthens the evidence for the predictability of dividend growth and stock market returns both in and out of sample. Economically, a market-timing investor who accounts for the time-varying expected dividend risk premium realizes an additional utility gain of 2.02% per year.

We examine whether climate change news risk is priced in corporate bonds. We estimate bond covariance with a climate change news index and find that bonds with a higher climate change news beta earn lower future returns, consistent with the asset pricing implications of demand for bonds with high potential to hedge against climate risk. Moreover, when investors are concerned about climate risk, they are willing to pay higher prices for bonds issued by firms with better environmental performance. Our findings suggest that corporate policies aimed at improving environmental performance pay off when the market is concerned about climate change risk.

Corporations can be viewed as large information ecosystems, not more narrowly as corporate entities, and the author uses the example of IBM to defend this point. This essay illustrates issues and topics that can be studied to enhance understanding of corporate history, building on prior methods used by scholars. It builds on research the author performed in writing a history of IBM from the 1880s to the present.