We combine a large-scale field experiment with a customized survey to study how consumers use and respond to ESG disclosure. In a sample of over 24,000 U.S. households, we first establish that while consumers moderately prefer to purchase from ESG-responsible firms, they rarely consult corporate reporting directly and face various frictions in learning about firm-level activities. In our field experiment, we then inform households about real firm-disclosed activities through several randomized information treatments. Consumers increase their purchase intent when exogenously presented with positive signals about environmental, social, and—to a lesser extent—governance activities. Full ESG reports increase purchase intentions only for consumers who choose to view them. After the experiment, consumers increase their actual purchases, but these effects are small, short-lived, and only materialize for social signals and viewed ESG reports. Through a follow-up survey, we provide explanations for why consumers (do not) change their behavior after our experiment.

I study disclosure choices in job postings and the following tradeoff: detailed postings inform and attract optimal job applicants (labor market channel) but could simultaneously inform competitors in labor and product markets (proprietary costs channel). First, I provide evidence consistent with a proprietary costs channel. Conditional on a set of labor demand characteristics, private firms and redacting firms write shorter postings (i.e., less contextual specificity), and postings are more often anonymous in high-secrecy industries. Then, I exploit the implementation of federal trade secrecy protections as a shock to both innovation and opacity incentives to assess the balance between the two channels. After implementation, firms demand higher skill levels for innovative jobs, consistent with protections spurring innovation. However, contextual specificity decreases, in line with the proprietary costs channel, as protections are maximized when firms remain opaque regarding innovation. This decrease is attenuated in tight labor markets, consistent with the proposed tradeoff.

We study the capital market effects of information centralization by exploiting the staggered implementation of digital storage and access platforms for regulated financial information (Officially Appointed Mechanisms, or OAMs) in the European Union. We find that the implementation of OAMs results in significant improvements in capital market liquidity, consistent with the notion that OAMs lower investors’ processing costs. The findings are more pronounced when processing costs are high to begin with, that is, when firms (i) are small and receive low business press coverage and (ii) have high levels of retail ownership. We then identify a mechanism through which centralization facilitates capital market effects: information spillovers. First, we find that liquidity improvements are larger when OAMs have features that easily allow investors to search for peer firm information. Second, liquidity improvements are larger for firms with a high share of industry peers operating on the same OAM and for firms with a high share of small, low-coverage peers on that OAM. Third, around the annual report release dates of peer firms, focal-firm liquidity improves and focal-peer stock return synchronicity increases. Overall, our evidence suggests that, even in a modern information age, information centralization improves capital market liquidity and facilitates the acquisition and use of peer firm information.

We study whether banks are riskier if managers have less liability. We focus on New England between 1867 and 1880 and consider the introduction of marital property laws that limited liability for newly wedded bankers. We find that banks with managers who married after a law had higher leverage, delayed loss recognition, made more risky and fraudulent loans, and lost more capital and deposits in the Long Depression of 1873 to 1878. These effects were most pronounced for bankers with the largest reduction in liability. We find no evidence that limiting liability increased firm investment at the county level.

U.S. law allows importers to request redaction of their own and their suppliers' identities in publicly accessible shipment records. We study these redactions and their relation to forced labor in global supply chains. Using over 100 million maritime shipment records from 2013 through 2023, we document the prevalence of shipments with redacted importer and supplier identities, finding systematic variation across time, origin, and goods. Consistent with importers facing reputational and follow-on regulatory costs related to forced labor scrutiny from third parties (e.g., NGOs, investigative journalists), we show that shipments originating from high-risk countries are more likely to have redacted identities. At the supply-chain level, we then find that the share of redacted identities increases when scrutiny intensifies, as captured by supply-chain inclusion on publicly disclosed high-risk lists and by events related to forced labor allegations in cotton and apparel sourcing. Trade-name and firm-level analyses provide additional evidence consistent with firms strategically reducing supply chain transparency in the presence of an important but understudied force: forced labor scrutiny.

Salary history bans (SHBs) restrict employers from inquiring about applicants’ prior pay and are intended to reduce gender pay gaps. Exploiting staggered adoption across U.S. states, we find that wages rise for both men and women under SHBs, consistent with stronger worker bargaining. Pay gaps for new hires do not narrow, but overall gender pay gaps widen. Hiring and job switching decline under SHBs, with larger effects for women, and match quality declines for all workers. The larger decline in women’s mobility helps explain why overall gender pay gaps widen.