Publications

We develop a new index of economic policy uncertainty based on newspaper coverage frequency. Several types of evidence — including human readings of 12,000 newspaper articles — indicate that our index proxies for movements in policy-related…

Based on two samples of high quality personality data for chief executive officers (CEOs), we use linguistic features extracted from conferences calls and statistical learning techniques to develop a measure of CEO personality in terms of the Big…

Size discovery is the use of trade mechanisms by which large quantities of an asset can be exchanged at a price that does not respond to price pressure. Primary examples of size discovery include “workup” in Treasury markets, “matching sessions”…

Betting on the most promising new ideas is key to creativity and innovation in organizations, but predicting the success of novel ideas can be difficult. To select the best ideas, creators and managers must excel at creative forecasting, the…

We study sourcing in a supply chain with three levels: a manufacturer, tier 1 suppliers, and tier 2 suppliers prone to disruption from, e.g., natural disasters such as earthquakes or floods. The manufacturer may not directly dictate which tier 2…

Rural electrification rates in India lag behind government goals, in part due to the inability of distribution companies (discoms) to fund central grid expansion. In the absence of central grid electrification, mini-grids offer significant…

We propose a new source of cross-sectional variation that may identify causal impacts of government spending on the economy. We use the fact that a large number of federal spending programs depend on local population levels. Every ten years, the…

This article considers the role of social movement allies in Congress in advancing pro-environmental legislation. We argue that compared to sponsors of legislation who hold moderate views, sponsors with extreme ideological positions will be less…

In this chapter, we introduce and discuss some of the most important and widely used models of personality. Focusing on trait theories, we first give a brief overview of the history of personality research and assessment. We then move on to…

In this paper we propose methods for estimating heterogeneity in causal effects in experimental and observational studies and for conducting hypothesis tests about the magnitude of differences in treatment effects across subsets of the population…

Bargaining power allows equity holders to recover a fraction of residual assets in bankruptcy, therefore reducing their exposure to default risk. We develop an agency-based model and provide the first evidence via structural estimation that…

Peers affect individual’s productivity in the workforce, in education, and in other team-based tasks. Using large-scale language data from an online college course, we measure the impacts of peer interactions on student learning outcomes and…

Equity is a cheap source of funding for a country’s largest financial institutions. In a large panel of 31 countries, we find that the stocks of a country’s largest financial companies earn returns that are significantly lower than stocks of non-…

This paper examines a private politics environment in which a confrontational activist and a cooperative activist face a profit-maximizing firm and a self-regulating firm. The environment is studied from a perspective that combines the radical…

We provide the first large-sample evidence of banks playing an important role in facilitating tax planning by client firms. Capturing bank-client relationships using lending contracts and measuring borrower tax avoidance with the three-year cash…

One of the most controversial issues in corporate governance is whether the CEO of a corporation should also serve as chairman of the board. In theory, an independent board chair improves the ability of the board to oversee management. However,…

In contrast to firm-level relations, researchers have found that aggregate earnings changes and aggregate stock returns are negatively related. In this paper, we construct new measures of aggregate earnings news based on revisions in analyst…

We study information acquisition and dynamic withdrawal decisions when a spreading rumor exposes a solvent bank to a run. Uncertainty about the bank’s liquidity and potential failure motivates depositors who hear the rumor to acquire additional…

Risk pooling has been studied extensively in the operations management literature as the basic driver behind strategies such as transshipment, manufacturing flexibility, component commonality, and drop shipping. This paper explores the benefit of…