This paper studies whether investor attention towards market-wide information shocks can lead to the underutilization of firm-specific information. I exploit the unpredictability of the North Korean missile test outcomes and analyze whether investors in South Korea fail to process earnings information when there is a missile test on the same day of the earnings announcement. I first find that successful missile tests reduce the average share price return by 2.3% within two trading days compared to failed tests. I then find that companies with earnings surprises in the top quartile experience a 0.8% increase in the abnormal return on the announcement day, but a same-day missile test takes away 37.5% of the positive response. The results show that salient market-wide information can crowd out another source of valuable information about firms. I also find that successful missile tests affect the political preferences in South Korea and increase the support for the left-wing party by 5% and conclude by examining whether concerns about national security can explain the observed investor behaviors.

This paper studies the impact of a father-specific parental leave policy on labor market outcomes. In 2006, Quebec reformed their parental leave policy to include up to three weeks of paid paternity leave that is not transferable to the mother. Using a state-level difference-in-difference approach, we find that the so-called daddy quota increased the probability of employment for women and decreased the wage of younger men. In a theoretical framework, we show that policy-driven changes in gender norms are consistent with our findings. The results suggest that daddy quota promoted equal opportunities for women in the labor market.

We study the effect of immigration on electoral outcomes using individual-level administrative data in Spain. We compare two channels through which immigration can affect the political preferences of the natives: assimilation, proxied by the endogeneous decision to become a citizen, and cultural differences, proxied by the country of origin. The differential paths to Spanish citizenship by country of origin and the variation in past settlement patterns allow us to disentangle the channels in a multiple instrumentation framework. We find that naturalized immigrants increase the support for the parties most favorable to immigration and non-naturalized immigrants increase the support for the main right-wing party that is not favorable to immigration. We also find that the effect of naturalization is higher among Latin American immigrants. The results suggest that both channels account for the change in political preferences while the assimilation channel shows a higher effect.

This paper studies whether high school and college ties between judges and lawyers affect sentencing. Using a legal personnel database in South Korea, I find that lawyers with a high school tie to the assigned judge are 6% more likely to win the case while college ties do not exhibit a significant impact. When focusing on district courts, the effect of high school tie on winning probability increases to 11%. Furthermore, in district courts, lawyers who went to the same college with the assigned judge in an overlapping period have 8% increased probability of winning. The unique micro-level analysis of the judiciary shows how social ties can compromise the legal institution.

We study the impacts of student backfilling, or filling vacant seats within a school, on charter school enrollments and incumbent student test scores. We use longitudinal student-level data on students enrolled in Massachusetts charter and traditional public schools. To deal with endogeneity in the number of vacant seats, we exploit a 2010 reform in Massachusetts that required charter schools to fill vacancies in specific grades and apply a triple difference-in-differences design across time, grade, and the number of vacant seats. The analysis assesses the validity of a claim that backfilling is harmful to incumbent students in charters that rely on students adopting the school's culture.