Accurate credit ratings are important for both investors and regulators. We demonstrate that the market for credit risk provides an important source of discipline for credit rating agencies (CRAs). We examine a model in which a CRA's rating is followed by a market for credit risk that provides a public signal - the price. More-informative trading increases the CRA's incentives to be accurate by making rating errors more transparent. We show that this source of discipline is (a) robust to moral hazard, multiple CRAs, and connected primary and secondary markets and (b) specific to the market for credit risk.

We develop a model to study the efficiency of socially responsible investing (SRI) as a market-based mechanism to control firms' externalities. When responsible and profit-motivated investors interact, the former tend to concentrate on a subset of firms in the economy, while excluding others. This concentration of responsible capital can mitigate free-riding and coordination issues in the adoption of green technologies, but it can also create product market power and crowd out the green investments of excluded firms. If the crowding-out dominates, firms' aggregate green investments and welfare are higher without SRI. In equilibrium, responsible capital concentrates the most when concentration is the least desirable.

A central finding of the theoretical literature on bargaining is that parties’ attitudes towards delay influence bargaining outcomes. However, the ability to endure delays, resilience, is often private information and hard to measure in most real-world contexts. In the context of collective bargaining, we show firms actively attempt to become financially resilient in anticipation of labor negotiations. Firms adjust their financial resilience to respond to the passage of right-to-work laws (RWLs), unionization, and labor negotiation events. Unions' financial structure also responds to RWLs. Our findings suggest resilience is key to understanding the process through which collective bargaining determines wages.

We study how the two-way interaction between corporate strategies and market valuations affects the design of managerial incentives. We describe how contracts motivate managers to focus on the metrics of performance that are more valuable to firms, and how incentives that seek this objective may appear to an observer who ignores the feedback to valuations. Low-powered incentives can be optimal when the most valuable metrics induce less volatile valuations. The managers' ability to influence valuations makes (a) firms too focused on earnings in their strategies and (b) the observed price-pay sensitivity a poor proxy for the quality of incentives.

After the gender pay gap narrows, what labor choices do men and women make? Several factors contribute to the persistence of the pay gap -- e.g., workplace flexibility, systemic discrimination, career costs of family. We show that how the labor market responds to the narrowing of the gap is just as pivotal for understanding this persistence. When the gender pay gap declines in a specific sector, women are relatively more likely to seek jobs in that sector, while men readjust their search to less equitable sectors. These compositional effects decrease female participation in less equitable sectors, which typically offer higher wages, reinforcing gender stereotypes and social norms that contribute to the glass ceiling. Through these effects, the same forces that reduce the gender pay gap at the bottom of the pay distribution also contribute to the persistence of gender inequities at the top. This self-reinforcing cycle underscores the need for reforms that are cross-sectoral and comprehensive to effectively achieve meaningful reductions in gender inequities across the labor market.

I analyze a model of competition between credit rating agencies (CRAs). In equilibrium, investors buy only assets that received high ratings from multiple CRAs. This has two contrasting effects on the quality of certification. On the one hand, the issuer needs to pass the screening of multiple CRAs; other things being equal, this improves certification. On the other hand, it has the perverse effect of incentivizing dishonest ratings, by introducing a team dimension that dilutes the CRAs' reputational concerns. When the perverse effect dominates, competition reduces the quality of certification. However, mandating disclosure of indicative ratings can restore the first-best outcome.