Publications

Antitrust laws mandate review of mergers and acquisitions (M&As) that exceed an asset size threshold based on accounting standards that exclude most intangible capital. We show that this exclusion leads to thousands of intangible-intensive M…

It is important to understand how persuasive the most-cited climate change messaging strategies are. In five replication studies, we found limited evidence of persuasive effects of three highly cited strategies (N = 3,216). We then…

Over the past several years, the utilization of liability-management exercises (LMEs) as financial restructuring strategies for overleveraged companies in the U.S. has exploded, taking share from conventional bankruptcies and workouts. The use of…

A seller posts a price for a single object. The seller’s and buyer’s values may be interdependent. We characterize the set of payoff vectors across all information structures. Simple feasibility and individual-rationality constraints identify the…

Understanding the human impacts of environmental hazards is a growing concern. While there is a plethora of research on climate adaptation, the literature is highly fragmented, and empirical studies are rarely carried out with global samples.…

We discuss the conditions under which global imbalances, such as China being a large foreign creditor and the United States being a large foreign debtor, might also generate power imbalances. We highlight possible theoretical channels and…

The modern financial system features complicated intermediation chains, with each layer performing some degree of credit/maturity transformation. We develop a dynamic model where an ultimate borrower obtains funds from overlapping generation…

We use newspapers to create Equity Market Volatility (EMV) trackers at daily and monthly frequencies. Our headline EMV tracker moves closely with the VIX and the S&P500 returns volatility in and out of sample. We exploit the volume of…

Governments define and protect property rights, which facilitate investment, regulate economic activities to manage externalities, and provide the public goods and services necessary for a healthy, educated and…

Ph.D. training across academic disciplines has faced significant challenges, with news and media outlets regularly highlighting student struggles, including frequent distrust and antagonism in relationships with faculty advisors. Given the…

Elected officials are increasingly extreme. Research trying to understand this trend has tended to focus on structural factors, such as primary elections and changes in the supply of candidates. Less emphasis has been placed on psychological…

Artificial intelligence (AI) will likely be the most transformative technology of the modern era. What if machines—AI for cognitive tasks and AI plus advanced robots for physical tasks—can perform every task a human can? This essay makes three…

Why, when, and how do strategic surprises emerge? Prevailing models trace the experience of strategic surprises to errors in information acquisition and utilization. They posit that we experience strategic surprises due to insufficient…

This paper uses microdata on US mutual fund and ETF portfolios from SEC Form N-PORT to study American investment in Chinese Renminbi (RMB)–denominated bonds. We show that, even as total foreign holdings of Chinese bonds rebounded in 2024, US…

The traditional approach to climate policy is to regulate the demand side, for example through an emissions fee. Supply-side regulation has received less attention. The two instruments are perfect substitutes in the first best but we show that…

We link new forecast and management data on over 20,000 firms to data on productivity in manufacturing and services. The panel survey was administered in the UK in July 2017 and November 2020, coinciding with two periods of considerable…

Obesity and excess weight are major global health challenges. Several technological solutions, including mobile apps, have been developed to help people lose weight, many of which provide access to human coaches who help consumers set goals,…

A long-standing question in social science is to what extent differences in management cause differences in firm performance. To investigate this we ran a management field experiment on large Indian textile firms. We provided free consulting on…

We investigate the management of information provision to maximize user engagement. A principal sequentially reveals signals to an agent who has a limited amount of information processing capacity and can choose to exit at any time. We identify a…

This article analyzes the results of the 2024 ADIA Lab Causal Discovery Challenge, a large-scale competition designed to evaluate whether machine learning methods can infer causal roles from observational data when ground-truth causal structures…