Governments increasingly use investment incentives to attract large capital-intensive projects, but the local returns to these policies remain uncertain. I study state tax incentives for data centers, an industry that has expanded rapidly as advances in cloud computing and artificial intelligence have increased the scale and resource intensity of computing infrastructure. Exploiting the staggered adoption of state data-center tax incentives and within-state variation in counties' proximity to large water bodies, I examine how subsidized data-center investment affects local public finances, employment, and resource markets. Following incentive adoption, exposed counties experience increases in government revenues and expenditures, alongside greater debt issuance. At the same time, the expansion of data centers places pressure on local inputs, including land and electricity. Employment effects are weaker and can become negative in the most exposed areas, consistent with the possibility that resource-intensive investment creates displacement alongside direct economic activity. The results highlight how technological change can alter the local costs and benefits of place-based investment incentives after those policies have already been designed.

Over the past two decades, many countries have implemented board gender quotas to increase female representation on corporate boards. Their broader effects on women’s careers within firms remain unclear. We examine these effects using California’s 2018 board gender quota as a natural experiment and a novel employer–employee dataset. We find increased hiring and promotion of women in mid-management, along with increased hiring in top-management and entry-level positions. The effects on departures vary by organizational level: women’s exit rates increase in top management, while exit rates decrease in entry-level positions. Our findings suggest that board gender quotas can expand women’s career opportunities beyond the boardroom, although their effects on retention vary across organizational levels. To investigate potential mechanisms, we examine employee ratings from Glassdoor and find improvements in workplace culture, compensation and benefits, career opportunities, and work-life balance. These findings suggest that board gender quotas may foster broader organizational changes that improve workplace conditions and support women’s career advancement beyond the boardroom.

We examine whether the mechanical effect of mergers on earnings per share influences acquisition activity. Differences in valuation between potential bidders and targets can allow an acquirer to increase reported earnings per share through a transaction even when that increase does not necessarily imply a corresponding improvement in underlying economic value. We show that firms are more likely to be acquired when a larger set of potential buyers could increase earnings per share by purchasing them. This relation remains after accounting for other established predictors of merger activity. From the bidder side, firms with access to a larger set of EPS-accretive targets are also more likely to undertake acquisitions, although much of this relation is associated with firm size and relative valuation. The evidence indicates that earnings-per-share considerations influence the matching of bidders and targets and can help explain which firms participate in mergers.

We study how acquisition prospects shape startup strategy. Acquisitions provide an important exit channel for entrepreneurial firms and can therefore affect decisions made well before an exit occurs. We examine how startups adjust product-development and hiring strategies when the likelihood of acquisition declines. Our analysis asks whether reduced acquisition prospects cause startups to invest more heavily in building durable standalone businesses and how these changes affect the composition of their workforce and product-development choices. The project provides evidence on how expected exit opportunities influence real decisions inside young firms.

We study whether municipal open-data initiatives affect housing markets by reducing information frictions. Local governments increasingly provide public records through centralized online data portals, making information about properties, permits, infrastructure, and local conditions easier for households and market participants to access. We examine whether the introduction of these portals improves housing-market liquidity by lowering the cost of acquiring and verifying local information. We study changes in transaction activity and other measures of market liquidity around the adoption of municipal open-data portals. The project sheds light on how improvements in public information infrastructure affect real-estate markets.