Publications

This article explores the application of oblivious equilibrium (OE) to highly concentrated markets. We define a natural extended notion of OE, called partially oblivious equilibrium (POE), that allows for there to be a set of strategically…

Corporate governance experts pay considerable attention to issues involving the board of directors. Because of the scope of the board’s role and the vast responsibilities that come with directorship, companies are expected to adhere to common…

How and by how much do supervisors enhance worker productivity? Using a company-based data set on the productivity of technology-based services workers, we estimate supervisor effects and find them to be large. Replacing a boss who is in the…

For much of its history, Berkshire Hathaway has been regarded primarily as the investment vehicle of Warren Buffett rather than a bona fide corporation. However, as Berkshire Hathaway has expanded beyond its core insurance operations, more…

No abstract available.

We examine the impact of Chinese import competition on broad measures of technical change—patenting, IT, and TFP—using new panel data across twelve European countries from 1996 to 2007. In particular, we establish that the absolute…

A recurring theme in sociological research is the tradeoff between fitting in and standing out. Prior work examining this tension has tended to take either a network structural or a cultural perspective. We instead fuse these two traditions to…

A state with climate policy may impose a tax on imported products for greenhouse gas emissions that occur in production and transportation to its border (a so-called border adjustment). A buyer may voluntarily commit to …

Local stock markets adjust sluggishly to changes in local inflation. When the local rate of inflation increases, local investors subsequently earn significantly lower real returns on local stocks, but not on local bonds or foreign stocks. Our…

Regional shocks are an important feature of the U.S. economy. Households’ ability to self-insure against these shocks depends on how they affect local interest rates. In the U.S., most borrowing occurs through the mortgage market and is…

We investigate the effect of social media advertising content on customer engagement using a large-scale field study on Facebook. We content-code more than 100,000 unique messages across 800 companies using a combination of Amazon Mechanical Turk…

A book review of Environmental Markets: A Property Rights Approach. Cambridge Studies in Economics, Choice, and Society by Terry L. Anderson, Gary D. Libecap

Firms are increasingly looking to eradicate social and environmental non-compliances at their suppliers in response to increasing regulations, consumer demand, potential for supply chain disruptions, and to improve their social, environmental,…

This commentary reviews the current status of the global use of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) and offers thoughts on the prospects for truly global financial reporting. The shift towards global use of IFRS is one of the…

This paper aims to understand the impact of temporal spacing between ad exposures on the likelihood of a consumer purchasing the advertised product. I create an individual-level data set with exogenous variation in ad exposure and its spacing by…

Facebook is rapidly gaining recognition as a powerful research tool for the social sciences. It constitutes a large and diverse pool of participants, who can be selectively recruited for both online and offline studies. Additionally, it…

I am delighted to be asked to give the Colston Warne Lecture at the American Council on Consumer Interests annual conference. What I want to cover in this lecture is what I consider to be one of the most important topics for consumers: financial…

We show that the class of preferences satisfying the gross substitutes condition of [Kelso and Crawford, 1982] is strictly larger than the class of endowed assignment valuations of [Hatfield and Milgrom, 2005], thus resolving the open question…

Observed contracts in the real-world are often very simple, partly reflecting the constraints faced by contracting firms in making the contracts more complex. We focus on one such rigidity, the constraints faced by firms in fine-tuning contracts…