We employ a large-scale field experiment to investigate consumer usage of firm disclosure. We establish that the average consumer moderately prefers purchasing from ESG-responsible firms but does not consider firm profitability. The experiment shows that consumers show increased purchase intent when exposed to positive signals about a firm's environmental, social, and, to a lesser extent, governance activities. However, we only see small changes in actual purchase behavior after the experiment. Read more

We examine the relation between regulators’ press releases about enforcement actions and violators on subsequent employee whistleblowing. We exploit a cutoff rule for the issuance of press releases based on monetary penalties followed by OSHA. A press release is followed by an increase in whistleblower tips at nearby facilities in the same industry, persisting for approximately six months. This result is concentrated in press releases highlighting OSHA’s whistleblower program, featuring misconduct reported by whistleblowers, receiving news coverage, as well as in counties with stronger employee protections and less OSHA monitoring. Read more

I examine how public attention affects whistleblowing activity by minorities and find that whistleblowing increases relatively more during Pride Month in counties that have high whistleblowing barriers for LGBTQ+ employees. This is not driven by changes in exposure to misconduct or regulatory behavior and I find similar results for racial minorities. A survey experiment reveals that my findings are at least partially driven by a decrease in perceived whistleblowing costs. Read more

We explore rating behavior in multi-rater performance evaluation systems, focusing on mutual rating relationships where two employees contemporaneously rate each other. We show that demographic similarity and organizational proximity increase the likelihood of mutual ratings and that those ratings tend to be higher than one-sided ratings, driven by both selective relationship formation and strategic rating behavior. Read more

In this paper, I show that regulators react to a decrease in local information dissemination by decreasing their activity. Specifically, I find that a local newspaper closure decreases the inspection rate in a given county-industry by 8%, compared to the same industry in a neighboring county. I also find that regulators react on the intensive margin by decreasing the extent of inspections and that the effect is stronger when regulators have more discretion over the enforcement activity. Read more

We examine disparities in regulators’ processing of employee whistleblower complaints. We find that regulators are less likely to respond to complaints arising from facilities with a greater share of racial minority employees. These results are unlikely to reflect differences in the severity of complaints; the average fine assessed when a violation is found is higher for facilities with a greater share of minority employees. We find that disparities are more pronounced when regulators are resource-constrained and traditional mechanisms designed to protect whistleblowers, such as anonymity and union presence, do not mitigate the observed disparities. However, we find that the political orientation of the local OSHA staff is associated with the magnitude of the disparity. Read more