Do unions protect workers from releasing or handling toxic waste? This paper studies the impact of unionization on toxic waste management at US facilities between 1991 and 2020. Using a regression discontinuity design on union elections, we find an increase in toxic waste releases, an increase in innovative waste prevention activities, and a decrease in end-of-pipe waste treatment at the facility site after unionization. Stronger union bargaining power amplifies these effects. The increase in innovative waste prevention cannot offset the reduction in waste treatment, resulting in more waste releases. Our findings suggest that unions' safety and cost concerns of waste treatment dominate the environmental and health concerns of waste releases.

Can we predict crisis resilience from managers' personality? In light of recent prevalent crises, we explore an underidentified determinant of strategic crisis management. We shed light on the decision-maker and examine whether managers' cognitive and non-cognitive traits influence their strategic responses to crises. In a sample of 1,408 young companies founded between 2012 and 2019 in Germany, we find that foreign and academic founders are more likely to respond with strategic and operative innovation. Moreover, we find that founders who are more agreeable tend to respond less to crises. Higher risk tolerance is negatively related to retrenchment and positively related to operative innovation strategies. Conscientious leaders are more likely to persevere and those who show higher openness to experience are more likely to strategically innovate. Our results have important implications as they illustrate how crisis management depends on personal characteristics of managers. Understanding these relationships encourages appointments of managers and decisions about the composition of founding teams that fit the company's strategic orientation. Further, the results have implications for policymakers and practitioners when designing measures to cope with economic distress.

Seven European countries have implemented mandatory board gender quotas in the last two decades. I examine how this exogenous shock to the board of directors in publicly-listed firms impacts board- and firm-level outcomes. My analysis is the first to exploit the scattered implementation of these seven European quotas between 2008 and 2019, using a staggered difference-in-differences design. I document an economically meaningful decrease in firm performance and monitoring quality, measured by the level of earnings management. Evidence from moderation analyses show that the negative quota effect on performance is stronger in firms with higher ex-ante monitoring quality. My results suggest that imposing restrictions on specific board attributes can produce inefficient board structures and negative real effects.