Publications

The policy choices of governments are frequently durable. From the building of bridges to the creation of social programs, investments in public infrastructure typically last well beyond a single electoral cycle. In this paper we…

We analyze a policy proposal for regulating the next generation of baseload electricity generation facilities in the United States. The cornerstone of this regulation is a (hypothetical) EPA mandate for an emission standard of 80 kg of CO2 per…

The quality and quantity of data on economic activity are expanding rapidly. Empirical research increasingly relies on newly available large-scale administrative data or private sector data that often is obtained through collaboration with…

Motivated by polar extremes of monopartisanship and nonpartisanship in existing literature on parties in legislatures, we introduce and analyze a more moderate theory of competitive partisan lawmaking. The distinguishing feature of competitive…

The downside risk capital asset pricing model (DR-CAPM) can price the cross section of currency returns. The market-beta differential between high and low interest rate currencies is higher conditional on bad market returns, when the market price…

The shareholders of public corporations have considerable interest in the choice of individual to serve as CEO of their company. They want to be assured that the company has a viable plan in place to replace the current CEO if necessary.

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Previous research has typically treated collection as a top-down process and focused on its later stages. However, collections may start by accident and are often triggered by incidental, bottom-up factors. The authors propose that a small number…

Consumers often feel pressed for time, but why? This research provides a novel answer to this question: subjective perceptions of goal conflict. We show that beyond the number of goals competing for their time, perceived conflict between goals…

We find strong empirical support for the risk-shifting mechanism to account for the puzzling negative relation between idiosyncratic volatility and future stock returns documented by Ang, Hodrick, Xing, and Zhang (2006). First, equity holders…

I study the efficiency of three prominent accounting rules in a delegated bidding setting where bidders’ incentives are tied to both accounting income and economic surplus. Trade efficiency is maximized (minimized) by the value-in-use method (…

Across five studies, this research reveals that feeling powerful increases saving. This effect is driven by the desire to maintain one’s current state. When the purpose of saving is no longer to accumulate money, but to spend it on a status-…

This study finds that more conservative earnings have lower information content in that higher conditional conservatism decreases the speed with which equity investor disagreement and uncertainty resolve at earnings announcements. We find that a…

Several studies have focused on stratifying patients according to their level of readmission risk, fueled in part by incentive programs in the U.S. that link readmission rates to the annual payment update by Medicare. Patient-specific predictions…

Although doctors and hospitals own their patients’ medical records, state and federal laws require that they provide patients with a copy at “reasonable cost.” We examine the effects of state laws that…

That citizens engage in retrospective voting is widely established in the literature. But to what extent is retrospection affected by the expectations that leaders set in advance? We develop a theoretical framework of how expectation setting…

 Fixed statutes and regulations often have variable consequences over time. If left unattended, such drift can severely erode the performance of government as an institution of representation. To better understand the mechanics of…

Many advertisers are reluctant to shift a large proportion of their advertising budgets to the Internet because they still view television advertising as the main vehicle for building a brand. Using a unique and rich data set comprising 20…

Do mandatory spending programs such as Medicare improve efficiency? We analyze a model with two parties allocating a fixed budget to a public good and private transfers each period over an infinite horizon. We compare two institutions that differ…

Although cooperation between groups is not unusual, most forms of human cooperation are in-group bounded and, sometimes, motivated by the desire to ward-off and subordinate rivaling out-groups. Building on evolutionary perspectives and models, we…

We analyze how banks’ responses to asset gains and losses can result in procyclical leverage. The analysis reveals that absent differences in regulatory risk weights across assets, leverage is not procyclical. We test predictions from the…