Lauren Cohen Assistant Professor of Finance Harvard Business School Baker Library 273 Soldiers Field Boston, MA 02163 Phone: 617.495.3888 Email: lcohen@hbs.edu

Curriculum Vitae Publications
	Supply and Demand Shifts in the Shorting Market (with Karl Diether and Christopher Malloy), 2007 Journal of Finance 62, 2061-2096. · Winner of the Smith Breeden Prize, Distinguished Paper, for the best paper published in the Journal of Finance, 2007
	Economic Links and Predictable Returns (with Andrea Frazzini), 2008 Journal of Finance, 63, 1977-2011. Appendix containing results on supplier momentum and analyst revisions · Winner of the Smith Breeden Prize, Distinguished Paper, for the best paper published in the Journal of Finance, 2008 · Winner of First Prize, Chicago Quantitative Alliance Academic Paper Competition, 2006 · Winner of BSI Gamma Foundation Grant, Firm Characteristics and Investment Management, 2006 The Small World of Investing: Board Connections and Mutual Fund Returns (with Andrea Frazzini and Christopher Malloy), 2008 Journal of Political Economy, 116, 951-979. · Winner of Barclays Global Investors Award, Best Paper in Asset Pricing, European Finance Association 2007 Loyalty Based Portfolio Choice, May 2007 Review of Financial Studies, forthcoming. Attracting Flows by Attracting Big Clients (with Breno Schmidt), November 2008 Journal of Finance, forthcoming. Appendix · Winner of Society of Quantitative Analysts Award, Best Paper in Quantitative Investments, Western Finance Association 2007 · Winner of Barclays Global Investors Best Paper Prize, Asset Allocation Symposium, European Finance Association 2006
Working Papers
	Do Powerful Politicians Cause Corporate Downsizing? (with Joshua Coval and Christopher Malloy), June 2009 This paper employs a new empirical approach for identifying the impact of government spending on the private sector. Our key innovation is to use changes in congressional committee chairmanship as a source of exogenous variation in state-level federal expenditures. In doing so, we show that fiscal spending shocks appear to significantly dampen corporate sector investment and employment activity. These corporate behaviors follow both Senate and House committee chair changes, are partially reversed when the congressman resigns, and are most pronounced among geographically-concentrated firms. The effects are economically meaningful and the mechanism - entirely distinct from the more traditional interest rate and tax channels - suggests new considerations in assessing the impact of government spending on private sector economic activity. Hiring Cheerleaders: Board Appointments of "Independent" Directors (with Andrea Frazzini and Christopher Malloy), February 2009 We use a unique, hand-collected database of independent directors to provide evidence that firms appoint independent directors who are overly sympathetic to management, while still technically independent according to regulatory definitions. We explore a subset of independent directors for whom we have detailed, micro-level data on their views regarding the firm prior to being appointed to the board: sell-side analysts who are subsequently appointed to the board of companies they previously covered. We find evidence that boards appoint overly optimistic analysts who are also poor relative performers. The magnitude of the optimistic bias is large: 82.0% of appointed recommendations are strong-buy/buy recommendations, compared to 56.9% for all other analyst recommendations. We find that appointed analysts’ optimism is stronger at precisely those times when firms’ benefits are larger, and that appointing firms increase earnings management, and perform poorly, following these board appointments. Sell Side School Ties (with Andrea Frazzini and Christopher Malloy), May 2009 Appendix We study the impact of social networks on agents’ ability to gather superior information about firms. Exploiting novel data on the educational backgrounds of sell side equity analysts and senior officers of firms, we test the hypothesis that analysts’ school ties to senior officers impart comparative information advantages in the production of analyst research. We find evidence that analysts outperform on their stock recommendations when they have an educational link to the company. A simple portfolio strategy of going long the buy recommendations with school ties and going short buy recommendations without ties earns returns of 6.60% per year. We test whether Regulation FD, targeted at impeding selective disclosure, constrained the use of direct access to senior management. We find a large effect: pre-Reg FD the return premium from school ties was 9.36% per year, while post-Reg FD the return premium is nearly zero and insignificant. In contrast, in an environment that did not change selective disclosure regulation (the UK), the analyst school-tie premium has remained large and significant over the entire sample period.

Teaching
	Finance 1

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