Working Papers

Under Review / Completed Papers

1) Spillover Effects of Accelerated Depreciation on Small Business Investment (with Riddha Basu  and Doyeon Kim ) 

Revise and Resubmit (Second Round) at Journal of Accounting Research

-CFEA 2022 , NFA 2022 , FMA 2022 , CICF 2022, WFA 2022, MFA 2022, FOM Group Conference 2021, NZFM 2021, EGROW 2021, IFC 2021, 

New Working Papers

2) Committing to Clean: Corporate Environmental Investment and Labor Market Competition   (with Sangeun Ha)  NEW!  (available on request)

Do firms preemptively invest in a clean working environment to retain workers when labor market competition intensifies? Using manufacturing plant location contests, we show that incumbent plants reduce on-site toxic releases by 9.3% after new plant entry is announced, with the largest declines among hazardous chemicals, no corresponding reduction in off-site transfers, and no loss of economic output. The reductions are achieved through process and production modifications, the most capital-intensive and least reversible category of abatement. We find that results are not necessarily driven by regulatory pressure or investor scrutiny. This effect is stronger when incumbent plants share similar labor pool with new plants or are in skill-intensive industries, and when the new plant is expected to be cleaner than the incumbent plant. The incumbent firms, which reduced toxic releases, experience lower wage growth and a worker turnover ratio. A back-of-the-envelope estimate shows a savings of $3.38 in wages for a dollar abatement expenditure. Our findings demonstrate that firms use irreversible abatement investment as a pre-commitment device, motivating environmental improvement beyond external regulatory or market constraints.

   --KER 2026, IIOC 2026, SDU Finance Workshop 2026, Copenhagen Business School, Seoul National University, Gothenburg University, and University of Copenhagen, LERA ASSA 2027*(Scheduled)

3) Priced by the Pool: Impact of Local Industrial Activity on Healthcare Costs of SMEs  (with Gunjan Seth)  NEW!  (available on request)

Employer-sponsored health insurance is a major operating cost for small and medium-sized firms, yet little is known about how local industrial activity affects premiums. We show that toxic plant entry reduces premiums for nearby incumbent firms by about 10%. The decline is larger when entrants add more workers, smaller when entrants are more toxic, absent for experience-rated and self-insured firms, and present only where multiple insurers compete for the local pool. Non-toxic plant entry generates substantially larger declines, while carcinogen reclassification reports increase premiums by 14%, showing that insurers price pollution information as well as pool risk. Under costly firm-specific underwriting, insurers rate most small and medium-sized firms on the pooled risk of the local market rather than on their own claims, so shocks to the pool reprice every firm in it. Our results are consistent with this mechanism, implying that a major operating cost of these firms is determined by pool composition, market structure, and perceived environmental health risk rather than by firm fundamentals alone.

            --UEA 2026 (Scheduled), LERA ASSA 2027*(Scheduled)

Old  Working Papers

4) Impact of Large Firms' Bankruptcies on Local Governments  (with Sudheer Chava and Baridhi Malakar) 

--Best Paper Award at the Annual Meeting of AEFIN Finance Forum, 2021

---AFA 2023, MFA 2022, AREUEA/ASSA Meeting, 2022, FMA 2021, SIEP 2021, INFER, 2021, AREUEA -Singapore, 2021, UEA - European Meeting, 2021,

5) Costly Entrepreneurship  (with Sudheer Chava, Manasa Gopal, and Yafei Zhang)  NEW!  (available on request)

          --University of Kentucky Finance Conference 2023*, Boulder Summer Conference on Consumer Financial Decision Making (Poster) 2023*

6) Worker Mobility and Firm Leverage: Evidence from State Health Mandates (with S Lakshmi Naaraayanan) 

         --Society of Financial Studies Cavalcade-Asia Pacific 2017,  American Finance Association PhD Poster Session 2018, Midwest Finance Association 2018, Asian Finance Association 2018

7) Enemy at the Gates: Trade Credit v/s Price Discount as a Strategic Tool

           - Asian Bureau of Economic Research Conference 2016, Financial Intermediation Research Society Conference 2017, Society of Financial Studies Cavalcade 2017, Conference on Financial Economics and Accounting 2017, Emerging Market Finance 2017