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A growing body of evidence indicates that children reared in harsh families are prone to chronic diseases and premature death later in life. To shed light on the mechanisms potentially underlying this phenomenon, we evaluated the hypothesis that harsh families engender a proinflammatory phenotype in children that is marked by exaggerated cytokine responses to bacterial stimuli and resistance to the anti-inflammatory properties of cortisol. We repeatedly measured psychological stress and inflammatory activity in 135 female adolescents on four occasions over 1.5 years. To the extent that they were reared in harsh families, participants displayed an increasingly proinflammatory phenotype during the follow-up analyses. This phenotype was marked by increasingly pronounced cytokine responses to in vitro bacterial challenge and a progressive desensitization of the glucocorticoid receptor, which hampered cortisol's ability to properly regulate inflammatory responses. If sustained, these tendencies may place children from harsh families on a developmental trajectory toward the chronic diseases of aging.

Carbon accounting is important for quantifying the sources of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that are driving climate change, and is increasingly being used to guide policy, investment, business, and regulatory decisions. The current practice for accounting emissions from consumed electricity, guided by standards like the GHG protocol, uses annual-average grid emission factors, although previous studies have shown that grid carbon intensity varies across seasons and hours of the day. Previous case studies have shown that annual-average carbon accounting can bias emission inventories, but none have shown that this bias is substantial or widespread. This study addresses this gap by calculating emission inventories for thousands of residential, commercial, industrial, and agricultural facilities across the US, and explores the magnitude and direction of this bias compared to hourly accounting of emissions. Our results show that annual-average accounting can over- or under-estimate carbon inventories as much as 35% in certain settings but result in effectively no bias in others. Bias will be greater in regions with high variation in carbon intensity, and for end-users with high variation in their electricity consumption across hours and seasons. As variation in carbon intensity continues to grow with growing shares of variable and intermittent renewable generation, these biases will only continue to worsen in the future. In most cases, using monthly-average emission factors does not substantially reduce bias compared to annual averages. Thus, the authors recommend that hourly accounting be adopted as the best practice for emissions inventories of consumed electricity.

This paper investigates the press's role as a monitor or \"watchdog\" for accounting fraud. I find that the press fulfills this role by rebroadcasting information from other information intermediaries (analysts, auditors, and lawsuits) and by undertaking original investigation and analysis. Articles based on original analysis provide new information to the markets while those that rebroadcast allegations from other intermediaries do not. Consistent with a dual role for the press, I find that business-oriented press is more likely to undertake original analysis while nonbusiness periodicals focus primarily on rebroadcasting. I also investigate the determinates of press coverage, finding systematic biases in the types of firms and frauds for which articles are published. In general, the press covers firms and frauds that will be of interest to a broad set of readers and situations that are lower cost to identify and investigate.

This paper examines whether investor relations (IR) officers provide value by facilitating the assimilation of firm information by the market. We find that firms with IR officers have lower stock price volatility, lower analyst forecast dispersion, higher analyst forecast accuracy, and quicker price discovery, consistent with IR officers aiding market participants in their assimilation of firm information. We also show that our findings are stronger for firms with longer-tenured IR officers. Finally, we find that when firms transition from a long-tenured IR officer to a new IR officer, stock price volatility increases, analyst forecasts become more disperse and less accurate, and the price discovery process slows, despite no significant change in the firm's disclosures, media coverage, or performance around the turnover. Collectively, these findings suggest that in-house IR officers, particularly those with greater experience, help facilitate information assimilation by the market, which has positive market effects.

Firm disclosures often reach only a portion of investors, which results in information asymmetry among investors and, therefore, lower market liquidity. This issue is particularly salient for firms that are not highly visible, as they tend not to receive broad news dissemination via traditional intermediaries, such as the press. This paper examines whether firms can reduce information asymmetry by more broadly disseminating their news. To isolate the impact of dissemination, we focus our analysis on firms' use of Twitter and exploit the 140-character message restriction. Specifically, using a sample of technology firms, we examine the impact of using Twitter to send market participants links to press releases that are provided via traditional disclosure methods. We find this additional dissemination of firm-initiated news via Twitter is associated with lower abnormal bid-ask spreads and greater abnormal depths, consistent with a reduction in information asymmetry. Moreover, this result holds mainly for firms that are not highly visible, consistent with them being in greater need of this additional dissemination channel. We also examine the impact of dissemination on a volume-based measure of liquidity, and find that dissemination is positively associated with liquidity.

Recent changes in technology and the media are causing significant changes in how capital markets assimilate and respond to information. We identify important themes in the disclosure literature and use this as a framework to discuss the conference papers that appear in this volume. These papers examine how managers' disclosure practices are being affected by changes in technology, the media, and capital markets. While this work makes important progress, we discuss how continuing technological change and the emergence of new forms of media offer further opportunities for research on the role of disclosure in capital markets.

We examine how managers' ethnic cultural background affects their communication with investors. Using earnings conference calls with executives from 42 countries, we find that managers from ethnic groups that have a more individualistic culture use a more optimistic tone and exhibit greater self-reference. Managers' ethnic culture has a lasting effect and persists for executives whose work experience later exposes them to different ethnic cultures. The effect of ethnic heritage is observed in dialogues that reflect real-time interactions (i.e., Q&A ) and is less pronounced in the scripted, less spontaneous portion of the calls (i.e., management discussion). Analysts respond positively to optimistic tone, but only those who share the manager's ethnic background adjust their earnings forecasts for the cultural component of managerial tone. The findings suggest that managers' ethnic background has a significant effect on how they communicate with the capital market and how the market responds to the disclosure.

In the United States, there are persistent and widening socioeconomic gaps in morbidity and mortality from chronic diseases. Although most disparities research focuses on person-level socioeconomic-status, mounting evidence suggest that chronic diseases also pattern by the demographic characteristics of neighborhoods. Yet the biological mechanisms underlying these associations are poorly understood. There is increasing recognition that chronic diseases share common pathogenic features, some of which involve alterations in the composition, diversity, and functioning of the gut microbiota. This study examined whether socioeconomic-status was associated with alpha-diversity of the colonic microbiota. Forty-four healthy adults underwent un-prepped sigmoidoscopy, during which mucosal biopsies and fecal samples were collected. Subjects' zip codes were geocoded, and census data was used to form a composite indicator of neighborhood socioeconomic-status, reflecting household income, educational attainment, employment status, and home value. In unadjusted analyses, neighborhood socioeconomic-status explained 12-18 percent of the variability in alpha-diversity of colonic microbiota. The direction of these associations was positive, meaning that as neighborhood socioeconomic-status increased, so did alpha-diversity of both the colonic sigmoid mucosa and fecal microbiota. The strength of these associations persisted when models were expanded to include covariates reflecting potential demographic (age, gender, race/ethnicity) and lifestyle (adiposity, alcohol use, smoking) confounds. In these models neighborhood socioeconomic-status continued to explain 11-22 percent of the variability in diversity indicators. Further analyses suggested these patterns reflected socioeconomic variations in evenness, but not richness, of microbial communities residing in the sigmoid. We also found indications that residence in neighborhoods of higher socioeconomic-status was associated with a greater abundance of Bacteroides and a lower abundance of Prevotella, suggesting that diet potentially underlies differences in microbiota composition. These findings suggest the presence of socioeconomic variations in colonic microbiota diversity. Future research should explore whether these variations contribute to disparities in chronic disease outcomes.

This paper examines the relation between cognitive perceptions of management and firm valuation. We develop a composite measure of investor perception using 30-second content-filtered video clips of initial public offering (IPO) roadshow presentations. We show that this measure, designed to capture viewers' overall perceptions of a CEO, is positively associated with pricing at all stages of the IPO (proposed price, offer price, and end of first day of trading). The result is robust to controls for traditional determinants of firm value. We also show that firms with highly perceived management are more likely to be matched to high-quality underwriters. In further exploratory analyses, we find the impact is greater for firms with more uncertain language in their written S-1. Taken together, our results provide evidence that investors' instinctive perceptions of management are incorporated into their assessments of firm value.