Publications

This paper empirically examines recently declassified data from the GATT/WTO on tariff bargaining. Focusing on the Torquay Round (1950-51), we document six stylized facts about these interconnected high-stakes international negotiations.…

Diversity research has long assumed that individuals’ perceptions of diversity are accurate, consistent with normative theories of judgments in economics and decision theory. We challenge this assumption. In six experiments, we show that when…

A coevolutionary perspective on knowledge strategy is developed, where variant positions in knowledge space are predicted to result in differential advantages in product space.  In particular, advantages to being both consistent and…

We examine gender discrimination in the financial advisory industry. We study a less salient mechanism for discrimination, firm discipline following missteps. There are substantial differences in the punishment of misconduct across genders.…

I discuss three phenomena which appear important for modelling the impact of uncertainty on growth. The first is international spillovers in uncertainty, which arise even in large countries like the United States and particularly in smaller…

It has been estimated that more than three-quarters of all jobs are found through social networks. This is known as referral-based hiring. As referrals have grown in popularity, so has the debate about their impact.

On the…

Psychological stress can cause decreases in well-being, increases in disease, and faster cellular death. Because the workplace is one prominent source of stress, it is both practically and theoretically useful to comprehensively understand which…

Daily directional trading by mutual funds (MFs) is highly-persistent and price-destabilizing, leading to return reversals lasting months.  This effect is distinct from the “flow-induced trading” phenomenon in prior studies.  At the same…

Efforts on developing, implementing and evaluating a marketing analytics framework at a real-world company are described. The framework uses individual-level transaction data to fit empirical models of consumer response to marketing efforts, and…

Why might a country choose to aggregate regulatory information into a single government agency? And what might reverse this choice? We consider an oversight setting in which the institutional structure affects access to information. A regulator…

This research tested a social-developmental process model of trust discernment. From sixth to eighth grade, White and African American students were surveyed twice yearly (ages 11–14; Study 1, N = 277). African American…

Machine-learning prediction methods have been extremely productive in applications ranging from medicine to allocating fire and health inspectors in cities. However, there are a number of gaps between making a prediction and making a decision,…

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

Financial education programmes are sometimes dismissed by critics claiming ‘mixed evidence’ on their effectiveness. This column analyses a full set of available randomised controlled trials evaluating the causal impact of financial education…

Using a large sample of business groups from several countries around the world, we show that group information matters for parent and subsidiary default prediction. Group firms may support each other when in financial distress. Potential group…

Governments may extract rent from private citizens by inflating taxes and spending on projects benefiting special interests. Using a spatial equilibrium model, I show that less elastic housing supplies increase governments’ abilities to extract…

Three studies explored the effects of uncertainty on people’s time preferences for financial gains and losses. In general, individuals seek to avoid uncertainty in situations of intertemporal choice. While holding the expected value of payouts…

We provide an equilibrium analysis of the efficiency properties of bilateral tariff negotiations in a three-country, two-good general equilibrium model of international trade when transfers are not feasible. We consider “weak-rules” …

Preemptive strikes are costly and harmful. Existing models of defensive aggression focus narrowly on the role fear plays in motivating preemptive strikes. Theoretically integrating the literatures on conflict, decision making, and emotion, the…

In summer 2016, the Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University conducted a nationwide survey of 1,…