This paper examines whether common institutional ownership is associated with CEO connectedness across firms. We document that higher common ownership between two same-industry firms predicts a greater likelihood that a newly appointed CEO has preexisting social ties to the incumbent CEO of the peer firm. To address endogeneity, we use mergers among institutional investors in a stacked difference-in-differences design. In a hiring-firm-peer panel that carries connection status forward from the most recent appointment, exposure to a merger-induced common blockholder approximately doubles the probability that the pair is observed in a connected-CEO state. In a broader firm-pair panel, it increases the probability of CEO connections by 48.7%. We further document that gaining CEO connections through another firm’s CEO appointment is associated with improvements in peer firms’ returns on assets and Tobin’s Q, in both OLS and IV specifications. Peer firms that gain such a connection also experience positive abnormal returns around other firms’ CEO hiring announcements, corresponding to an average increase of $112.5 million in shareholder value. These performance patterns suggest that CEO connections may be valuable from a portfolio-level perspective. Consistent with this interpretation, the association between common ownership and CEO connections is concentrated among product-similar and organizationally complex firms and strengthens after the 2008–2009 financial crisis, when connections appear more valuable. Our findings point to CEO connection as a potential governance channel through which common institutional ownership is linked to firm outcomes, complementing prior work on executive compensation, shareholder voting, and board interlocks.

We revisit the employer size wage effect (ESWE) – arguably the most basic and influential departure from the law of one price for labor. Our main result is that this canonical fact disappears completely across establishments within the same firm, even though they operate in different local labor markets. We uncover and dissect this fact by including a firm fixed effect in otherwise standard cross-sectional regressions of wages on establishment size. We implement this demanding specification in population-wide triple-linked firm-establishment-employee data in Germany. This result is new in the ESWE literature (for which our paper also provides the first systematic meta-analysis). This wage-size decoupling is hard to square with the view that employment is determined along a finitely elastic employerspecific labor supply curve – i.e., employers pay exactly the minimum needed for the quantity of labor, but no more – the foundation of the monopsony view. By contrast, large multi-establishment firms (MEF) appear to hire off their labor supply curves (or those curves are very elastic), pay wage premia above the monopsonistic minimum, and leave excess labor supply. We find some evidence for a reemergence of the ESWE within low-premium MEFs. Overall, at least for the 25% of German employment in large firms for which the ESWE disappears, wage setting and employment determination may be better accounted for by alternative models, namely accommodating above-market-clearing wage premia and rationing of labor supply, such as efficiency wage theories.

Institutional common ownership of firm pairs in the same industry increases the likelihood of a preexisting social connection among their CEOs. We establish this relationship using a quasi-natural experiment that exploits institutional mergers combined with firms’ hiring events and detailed information on CEO biographies. In addition, for peer firms, gaining a CEO connection from a hiring firm’s CEO appointment correlates with higher returns on assets, stock market returns, and decreasing product similarity between companies. We find evidence consistent with common owners allocating CEO connections to shape managerial decisionmaking and increase portfolio firms’ performance.

We measure desired labour supply at the extensive (employment) margin in two representative surveys of the U.S. and German populations. We elicit reservation raises: the percent wage change that renders a given individual indifferent between employment and nonemployment. It is equal to her reservation wage divided by her actual, or potential, wage. The reservation raise distribution is the nonparametric aggregate labour supply curve. Locally, the curve exhibits large short-run elasticities above 3, consistent with business cycle evidence. For larger upward shifts, arc elasticities shrink towards 0.5, consistent with quasi-experimental evidence from tax holidays. Existing models fail to match this nonconstant, asymmetric curve.

We investigate public preferences for equity-enhancing policies in access to early child care, using a survey experiment with a representative sample of the German population (n ≈ 4, 800). We observe strong misperceptions about migrant-native inequalities in early child care that vary by respondents’ age and right-wing voting preferences. Randomly providing information about the actual extent of inequalities has a nuanced impact on the support for equity-enhancing policy reforms: it increases support for respondents who initially underestimated these inequalities, and tends to decrease support for those who initially overestimated them. This asymmetric effect leads to a more consensual policy view, substantially decreasing the polarization in policy support between under- and overestimators. Our results suggest that correcting misperceptions can align public policy preferences, potentially leading to less polarized debates about how to address inequalities and discrimination.

This paper investigates the critical role of church membership in the process of economic recovery after high-impact natural disasters. We document a significant adverse treatment effect of the 2005 hurricane season in the Southeastern United States on establishment-level productivity. However, we find that establishments in counties with higher rates of church membership saw a significantly stronger recovery in terms of productivity for 2005–10. We also show that church membership is correlated with post-disaster entrepreneurship activities and population growth.

This study examines how antitrust law adoptions affect horizontal merger and acquisition (M&A) outcomes. Using the staggered introduction of competition laws in 20 countries, we find antitrust regulation decreases acquirers’ five-day cumulative abnormal returns surrounding horizontal merger announcements. A decrease in deal value, target book assets, and industry peers' announcement returns are consistent with the market power hypothesis. Exploiting antitrust law adoptions addresses a downward bias to an estimated effect of antitrust enforcement (Baker (2003)). The potential bias from heterogeneous treatment effects does not nullify our results. Overall, antitrust policies seem to deter post-merger monopolistic gains, potentially improving customer welfare.

This paper studies whether common ownership affects the direction of technological change. We develop a task-based model in which commonly owned firms internalize wage externalities from labor market rivals, increasing incentives to automate. We establish causality by exploiting institutional investor mergers in a dynamic DiD design, using U.S. data on institutional ownership, establishment-level employment, and automation patents. When institutional investor mergers increase common ownership among labor market rivals, the annual probability of those firms producing an automation patent increases by 3.79 percentage points and employment growth falls by 3.8 percentage points on average. Both effects disappear without labor market overlap.