Publications

Newly public companies tend to exhibit abnormally high accruals in the year of their initial public offering (IPO). Although the prevailing view in the literature is that these accruals are caused by opportunistic misreporting, we show that these…

We examine methods used to survey firms on their management and organizational practices. We contrast the strengths and weaknesses of “open ended questions” (like the World Management Survey) with “closed questions” (like the MOPS). For this type…

We test for the existence of housing bubbles associated with a failure of the transversality condition that requires the present value of payments occurring infinitely far in the future to be zero. The most prominent such bubble is the classic…

According to Terror Management Theory, people respond to reminders of mortality by seeking psychological security and bolstering their self-esteem. Because previous research suggests that having power can provide individuals a sense of security…

The present research re-examines one of the most basic assertions regarding the evaluation of hedonic experiences: the end effect. The end effect suggests that the retrospective evaluation of an experience is disproportionately influenced by the…

The board of directors has a responsibility to investigate credible allegations that management has engaged in activity that is not in the interest of the company or its shareholders. In the case of illegal activity, the appropriate response is…

In this paper, I examine the systemic effects of campaign spending, looking at outcomes at the level of the legislature rather than the individual seat. Using a difference-in-differences design, I show that state-level corporate campaign…

We propose a new measure of the economic importance of each innovation. Our measure uses newly collected data on patents issued to US firms in the 1926 to 2010 period, combined with the stock market response to news about patents. Our patent-…

Salient successes and failures, such as spectacular venture capital investments or agonizing bankruptcies, affect consensus beliefs about the viability of particular markets. We argue that collective sense making in the wake of such vital events…

U.S. government bonds are considered to be the world’s safe store of value, especially during periods of economic turmoil such as the events of 2008. But what makes U.S. government bonds “safe assets?” We highlight coordination among investors,…

We study the convergence of the predictive surface of regression trees and forests. To support our analysis we introduce a notion of adaptive concentration for regression trees. This approach breaks tree training into a model selection phase in…

Few topics in public opinion research have attracted as much attention in recent years as partisan polarization in the American mass public. Yet, there has been considerably less investigation into whether people perceive the electorate to…

We study the subgame perfect equilibria of two player stochastic games with perfect monitoring and geometric discounting. A novel algorithm is developed for calculating the discounted payoffs that can be attained in equilibrium. This algorithm…

There are many studies where researchers are interested in estimating average treatment effects and are willing to rely on the unconfoundedness assumption, which requires that treatment assignment is as good as random conditional on pre-treatment…

We develop a model of advertising markets in an environment where consumers may switch (or “multi-home”) across publishers. Consumer switching generates inefficiency in the process of matching advertisers to consumers, because advertisers may not…

This paper examines the approaches accounting researchers adopt to draw causal inferences using observational (or nonexperimental) data. The vast majority of accounting research papers draw causal inferences notwithstanding the well-known…

User reviews aggregate word of mouth and often greatly enhance consumers’ ability to estimate product quality. Consumers decide for themselves whether and how to incorporate user reviews with other sources when evaluating options (e.g., a small…

Presidential candidates purchase advertising based on each state’s potential to tip the election. The structure of the Electoral College concentrates spending in battleground states, such that a majority of voters are ignored. We estimate an…

Institutional investors pay considerable attention to the quality of a company’s governance. Unfortunately, it is difficult for outside observers to reliably gauge governance quality. Oftentimes, poor governance manifests itself only after…

Institutional investors pay considerable attention to the quality of a company’s governance. Unfortunately, it is difficult for outside observers to reliably gauge governance quality. Oftentimes, poor governance manifests itself only after…