Should households buy their homes? Contrary to popular expert advice, our block-bootstrap life-cycle simulation provides an affirmative answer. Homeownership generates wealth and welfare gains relative to rent-for-life benchmarks that invest only in financial assets. It lowers household portfolio downside risk and improves retirement consumption and bequest outcomes. The gains reflect risk aversion, intertemporal substitution, leverage-induced trade-offs between consumption and the timing of home purchases, and the liquidity costs of homeownership. Their magnitude varies across labor income profiles, house price environments, and mortgage rates. Our findings suggest that homeownership can build wealth more effectively than common portfolio strategies, including all-equity portfolios.

Using labor skill demand disclosed in job postings as a proxy for firms' growth strategies, we find that similar growth strategies increase the likelihood of two firms merging. In particular, a firm is more likely to become a target as its labor skill demand becomes more similar to that of its potential acquirer. Similar growth strategies ameliorate post-merger integration challenges in facilitating merger deals. Following the merger, the combined firm continues hiring the same skills, consistent with the growth strategy persisting. These types of mergers experience more synergies and superior operating performance.

This paper investigates whether and how short sellers influence the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's (SEC) decision to initiate investigations. We find that higher short interest is significantly associated with an increased likelihood of SEC investigations, suggesting that the SEC relies on short sellers as information intermediaries in its enforcement process. Further analyses reveal that this relation is more pronounced when the SEC's fraud detection capacity is constrained or when firm-level information uncertainty is high.

The SEC has limited resources that it can dedicate to investigating firms. Which type of firm is the SEC more likely to suspect of potential wrongdoing? We show that firms receiving a "red flag" for misconduct (e.g. comment letters, restatements, whistleblower reports) are less likely to experience an SEC investigation if they have a large fraction of women directors. These firms are also less likely to experience enforcement by the SEC. We address endogeneity by showing that these results are particularly pronounced when the US government changes to a Democratic administration from a Republican administration. Results are particularly large among smaller firms for which public information is more limited.

Using hand-collected data on founder CEOs and SEC investigations obtained via the Freedom of Information Act, we find that founder-CEO firms are 29% more likely to face SEC investigations, yet these investigations rarely lead to accounting and auditing release enforcement actions. CEO attributes—power, risk-taking, and visibility—drive this heightened scrutiny, reflecting the SEC's use of academically motivated variables and fraud-deterrent strategies.

We use multi-class machine learning classifiers to identify the stocks that outperform or underperform other stocks. The resulting long-short portfolios achieve annual Sharpe ratios of 1.67 (value-weighted) and 3.35 (equal-weighted), with annual alphas ranging from 29% to 48%. These results persist after controlling for machine learning regressions and remain robust among large-cap stocks. Machine uncertainty, as measured by predicted probabilities, impairs the prediction performance. Stocks with higher machine uncertainty experience lower returns, particularly when human proxies of information uncertainty align with machine uncertainty.

Campbell and Shiller (1988) show that if payout growth is not predictable, the payout-price ratio must predict returns. Using 150-year data from 16 developed countries across bond, equity, and housing markets, I study this implication using payout-price ratios (coupon price, dividend price, rent price). None of the 48 country-asset combinations shows consistent in-sample and out-of-sample performance with positive utility gain for the mean-variance investor. However, 14 (5) countries have predictable payout growth in the equity (housing) markets.

We construct firm-level social network using partnership relations. Systematically important firms—firms that are highly connected and of greater centrality—face more SEC scrutiny across different enforcement actions, including AAER actions and SEC investigations. Our findings remain robust when applying stacked difference-in-differences analyses that leverage exogenous firm-level reductions in network sizes within corresponding Louvain communities, driven by mergers and acquisitions.