Publications

When the social boundaries between groups are breached, the tendency for people to erect and maintain symbolic boundaries intensifies. Drawing on extant perspectives on boundary maintenance, we distinguish between two strategies that people…

Do mergers help or hinder collusion? This article studies the stability of the vitamin cartels in the 1990s and presents a repeated-games approach to quantify “coordinated effects” of a merger. We use data and direct evidence from American courts…

Objective: Satisfaction with healthcare may be captured by surveys of patients and staff, or in extreme cases, the number and severity of medical disputes. This study tries to investigate the relationship between satisfaction and…

In this article, we examine whether comovement in the stock prices of pairs of Chinese firms connected to the same political network are systematically shaped by the prevailing coordination versus competition incentives of that network’s…

Cooperation is essential for group survival and success. Inequality among group members can undermine voluntary cooperation in groups, and this problem is exacerbated when those with less power observe those with more power behave selfishly. We…

Consistent with the predictions of recent behavioral models of reference- or context-dependent preferences, we find that gasoline demand in the U.S. is up to three times more elastic when prices rise above their average over the previous year…

We develop a simple flexible-price model of business cycles driven by spikes in risk premiums. Aggregate shocks increase firms’ uninsurable idiosyncratic risk and raise risk premiums. We show that risk shocks can create quantitatively plausible…

Environmental, social and governance (ESG) considerations have dominated the discussion of corporate purpose in recent years. We examine commonly accepted notions about ESG that are foundational to the discussion but receive little critical…

Shadow banks service a substantial portion of household debt in the United States, including half of residential mortgages. They also funded and implemented a large portion of the CARES Act-driven debt relief. Despite uniform policy and similar…

Translating the relevance of preclinical models (in vitro, animal models, or organoids) to their relevance in humans presents an important challenge during drug development. The rising abundance of single-cell genomic data from human tumors and…

The property tax is the most under-utilized tax in developing countries. We evaluate the revenue and welfare effects of the main policy instruments used to raise property tax revenue: tax rate changes and enforcement. Using administrative data…

This paper studies the construction of p-values for nonparametric outlier detection, taking a multiple-testing perspective. The goal is to test whether new independent samples belong to the same distribution as a reference data set or are…

Decades of research suggest that information exchange in groups and organizations can reliably improve judgment accuracy in tasks such as financial forecasting, market research, and medical decision making. However, we show that improving the…

The global demand for desalinated water is increasing at a remarkable rate. In a future with increasing demand for water and low-carbon electricity, an interesting ecological dilemma emerges. In a decarbonized world, providing desalinated water…

Product reliability is a key concern for manufacturers. We examine worker turnover as a significant but under recognized determinant of product reliability. Our study collects and integrates (1) data reporting factory worker staffing and turnover…

Objective: To understand the consequences of employee volunteering and possible psychological mechanisms that produce these effects.

Methods: Using data from more than 50,000 responses to Britain’s…

We examine gender differences in misconduct punishment in the financial advisory industry. There is a “gender punishment gap”: following an incident of misconduct, female advisers are 20% more likely to lose their jobs and 30% less likely to find…

We study three centuries of UK fiscal history. Before World War I, when the UK dominated global bond markets, the UK’s government debt was not always fully backed by its future surpluses. As predicted by theories of safe asset determination,…

When individuals receive benefits from government programs, does it affect their attitudes toward those programs or toward government generally? A growing literature blends policy feedback theory and political behavior research to explore these…