Publications

Marriage can substitute for formal business contracts, especially in environments that lack a well-established system of contract or corporate law. In such settings, marriage can facilitate the efficient organization of labor and capital. In this…

Does American political representation work as predicted by theory? On average, political candidates diverge considerably in their ideological positioning, but do they diverge less on issues of particular salience to their local constituents? We…

Decades of past research point to the downside of evaluative inconsistency (i.e., ambivalence), suggesting that it is an unpleasant state that can result in negative affect. Consequently, people are often motivated to resolve their ambivalence in…

Performance-based promotion schemes in administrative hierarchies have limitations. Chinese provincial leaders, despite facing strong career concerns, make different policy decisions depending on their career backgrounds. Provincial party…

A key question about achievement motivation is how to maintain it over time and in the face of stress and adversity. The present research examines how a motivational process triggered by a social-psychological intervention propagates benefits…

We propose a synthesis of two lines of sociological research on boundary spanning in cultural production and consumption. One, research on cultural omnivorousness, analyzes choice by heterogeneous audiences facing an array of crisp cultural…

We present a rational theory of reform fatigue. At each instant a politician chooses to divide effort between reforms and the status quo, and this choice is modeled as a two-armed bandit problem. Reforms are expected to yield a higher rate of…

Representation on pension fund boards by state officials—often determined by statute decades past—is negatively related to the performance of private equity investments made by the pension fund, despite state officials’ relatively strong…

Others are better qualified than I to comment on Andy Grove’s many contributions as a member of the founding team of Intel Corporation, as the company’s CEO and chairman, or as a U.S. citizen and committed philanthropist, but I may be able…

Research on status and group productivity has highlighted that status hierarchies tend to emerge quickly and encourage contributions to group efforts by rewarding contributors with enhanced status. This and other status research has tended to…

Even though epidemiological evidence links specific workplace stressors to health outcomes, the aggregate contribution of these factors to overall mortality and health spending in the United States is not known. In this paper, we build a model to…

Some technologies save lives—new vaccines, new surgical techniques, safer highways. Others threaten lives—pollution, nuclear accidents, global warming, and the rapid global transmission of disease. How is growth theory altered when technologies…

This paper examines Meg Whitman’s tenure as HP’s CEO from September 2011 till March 2016. It considers the external contextual forces shaping radical changes in the information technology industry as well as the internal contextual forces…

CEO compensation is a highly controversial subject. While most company directors believe that CEO pay is not a problem, the majority of the American public believes that it is. The difficulties that boards face in justifying CEO pay levels in…

Prominent theories suggest that compulsive behaviors, characteristic of obsessive compulsive disorder and addiction, are driven by shared deficits in goal-directed control, which confers vulnerability for developing rigid habits. However, recent…

Compared to the predictions of complete market models, actual exchange rates are puzzlingly smooth and only weakly correlated with macro-economic fundamentals, suggesting that market incompleteness plays a key role in exchange rate dynamics.…

We construct a novel database containing the universe of financial advisers in the United States from 2005 to 2015, representing approximately 10% of employment of the finance and insurance sector. We provide the first large-scale study that…

We extend the CAPM to a setting where a firm reports earnings prior to selling shares to investors. We show that an entrepreneur, as representative of a firm’s initial owners, will choose to report earnings that asymmetrically reflect future cash…

CEO compensation is a highly controversial subject. While most company directors believe that CEO pay is not a problem, the majority of the American public believes that it is. The difficulties that boards face in justifying CEO pay levels in…

Facebook has become a significant part of daily life for nearly 1.4 billion people worldwide. While many researchers have explored Facebook’s influence on individuals and societies, its potential as a powerful research tool has been largely…