Publications

Sports lifestyle company Quiksilver filed for bankruptcy in September 2015. Oaktree is considering an additional investment in the company to facilitate the restructuring. Students must consider whether Oaktree should invest given the risks of…

In stochastic optimization, the population risk is generally approximated by the empirical risk which is in turn minimized by an iterative algorithm. However, in the large-scale setting, empirical risk minimization may be computationally…

Most public policies continue in effect until changed, and many are stable for extended periods even though they could be changed at any time. This paper presents a simple approach to characterizing Markov perfect equilibria of dynamic…

Workplace wellness programs have become increasingly common in the United States, although there is not yet consensus regarding the ability of such programs to improve employees’ health and reduce health care costs. In this paper, we study a…

Do differences in health literacy contribute to the widely documented health-income gradient? In the context of Sweden, we document a strong relationship between exposure to health-related expertise — captured by the presence of a health…

Existing research demonstrates that financial constraints are widespread and influence consumer attention, preference, choice, and consumption in a variety of ways. Despite the growing knowledge of how financial constraints affect the consumer…

We present a review of the diversity ideologies literature from the target’s perspective. In particular, we focus on how diversity ideologies — beliefs or organizational practices with regards to how to approach diversity — affect racial…

Two decades ago, McKinsey advanced the idea that large U.S. companies are engaged in a “war for talent” and that to remain competitive they need to make a strategic effort to attract, retain, and develop the highest-performing executives. To…

This paper describes a practical system for Multi Touch Attribution (MTA) for use by a publisher of digital ads. We developed this system for JD.com, an eCommerce company, which is also a publisher of digital ads in China. The approach has…

Counterattitudinal-argument generation is a powerful tool for opening people up to alternative views. Based on decades of research, it seems that this technique should be especially effective when people take the perspective of individuals who…

This paper develops and evaluates a theory of status belief transfer, the process by which gender status beliefs differentially affect the evaluations of products made by men and women. We conduct three online experiments to evaluate this theory…

A new dataset of organizational testimony at U.S. Congressional hearings on environmental protection is used to examine how social movement organizations use issue expertise to gain access to the policy process. Environmental movement…

I study a dynamic model in which a decision-maker acquires information about the payoffs of different alternatives prior to making her decision. The key feature of the model is the flexibility of information: the decision-maker can choose any…

We build a dynamic model to link two empirical patterns: the negative failure probability-return relation (Campbell, Hilscher, and Szilagyi, JF, 2008) and the positive distress risk premium-return relation (Friewald, Wagner, and Zechner, JF, 2014…

Accepted at the Journal of Financial Economics

This paper develops a quantitative dynamic general equilibrium model in which households’ preferences for safe and liquid assets constitute a violation of Modigliani and Miller. I…

We model the widespread failure of contracts to share risk using available indices. A borrower and lender can share risk by conditioning repayments on an index. The lender has private information about the ability of this index to measure the…

We construct a novel measure of disclosure choice by firms. Our measure uses linguistic analysis of conference calls to flag a manager’s response as providing an explicit “non-answer” to an analyst’s question. Using our measure, about 11% of…

Brokerage and brokering are pervasive and consequential organizational phenomena. Prevailing models underscore social structure and focus on the consequences that come from brokerage—occupying a bridging position between…

Since 2015, the Stanford Latino Entrepreneurship Initiative (SLEI) has annually collected data on Latino business owners across the United States to provide timely updates on trends in Latino entrepreneurship.

This report provides academic…

We replicate eight influential papers to provide empirical evidence that, in the presence of heterogeneous treatment effects, OLS with fixed effects (FE) is generally not a consistent estimator of the average treatment effect (ATE). We propose…