Publications

We investigate the determinants of the efficiency of firms with a focus on the role of corruption. We construct a simple theoretical model where corruption increases the factor requirements of firms because it diverts managerial effort away…

For two districts or countries that try to internalize externalities, I analyze a bargaining game under private information. I derive conditions for when it is efficient with uniform policies across regions — with and without side payments — and…

The importance of concession sales in the movie exhibition industry is widely acknowledged among economists and other social scientists that have studied this industry in the past. Despite this recognition, the lack of appropriate data has…

Elected officials are commonly accused of being ideologically rigid, or failing to alter their positions in response to relevant policy information. We examine this phenomenon with a theory in which politicians have private information…

Motivated by the failure of current methods to control dengue fever, we formulate a mathematical model to assess the impact on the spread of a mosquito-borne viral disease of a strategy that releases adult male insects homozygous for a dominant,…

This paper studies the problem of allocating a good between two players in each period of an infinite-horizon game. The players’ valuations in each period are private information, and the valuations change over time.

The discussion reinforces and expands on some of the fundamental issues about endogeneity raised by Chenhall and Moers (European Accounting Review, this issue, pp. 173–195). We focus on the econometric problems researchers encounter when…

Despite the importance of doing so, people do not always correctly estimate the distribution of opinions within their group. One important mechanism underlying such misjudgments is people’s tendency to infer that a familiar opinion is a prevalent…

Economists devote considerable effort to grad­u­ate stu­dent edu­cation bu­t have condu­cted rela­tively little research on the determinants of stu­dent performance or placement in the job market. Do gradu­ate stu­dents who do well in core…

The present research explores a contextual perspective on persuasion in multiple message situations. It is proposed that when people receive persuasive messages, the effects of those messages are influenced by other messages to which people…

We show theoretically that the responsiveness of a fund manager’s portfolio allocations to changes in public information decreases in the manager’s skill. We go on to estimate this sensitivity (RPI) as the R² of the regression…

While standard real options models assume that agents possess a constant rate of time preference, there is substantial evidence that agents are impatient about choices in the short term but are patient when choosing between long-term alternatives…

“Limits of Arbitrage” theories hypothesize that the marginal investor in a particular asset market is a specialized arbitrageur rather than a diversified representative investor. We examine the mortgage-backed securities (MBS) market in this…

We consider a retailer that sells a product with uncertain demand over a finite selling season. The retailer sets an initial stocking quantity and, at some predetermined point in the season, optimally marks down remaining inventory. We…

We document that the observed persistence amongst the worst performing actively managed mutual funds is attributable to funds that have performed poorly both in the current and prior year. We demonstrate that this persistence results from an…

A three-stage model isolates conditions under which an executive appointment to a collective choice body, such as a court or a regulatory agency, has an immediate bearing on policy. The model strikes a balance between previous formal models that…

This paper studies the properties and determinants of managers’ multi-year financial forecasts. Using one- to five-year-ahead forecasts reported by private venture-backed firms, we ask whether, by how much, and why biases in managers’ forecasts…