Working Papers

How does cultural heterogeneity in an organization relate to its underlying capacity for execution and innovation? Existing literature often understands cultural diversity as presenting a trade-off between task coordination and creative…

This study of the transformation of the mobile device industry examines how cross-boundary disruption (XBD) superseded the incumbents’ sustaining innovation, which helps explain the rapid rise of Apple and Google Android and the equally rapid…

Motivated by recent initiatives to increase transparency in procurement, we study the effects of disclosing information about previous purchases in a setting where an organization delegates its purchasing decisions to its employees. When…

In the years leading up to the financial crisis that began in 2007, the core of the financial system was vulnerable to major shocks emanating from any of a variety of sources. While this particular crisis was triggered by over-levered home owners…

Consider an extensive-form mechanism, run by an auctioneer who communicates sequentially and privately with agents. Suppose the auctioneer can deviate from the rules provided that no single agent detects the deviation. A mechanism is credible if…

Energy storage will be key to overcoming the intermittency and variability of renewable energy sources, like wind and solar power. This paper proposes a cost metric for measuring the cost of energy storage and for identifying optimally sized…

We examine the effect of firm-specific business disruptions on the performance of small firms in emerging markets. We study the impact of both managerial disruptions (which result in the absence of the entrepreneur-owner or more broadly a key…

Winner 2017 BlackRock Applied Research Award

AQR Top Finance Graduate Award 2018

We provide evidence that a weak banking sector contributed to low productivity following the European debt crisis. An…

This paper shows that the frequency of capital structure adjustment varies significantly across firms. The most active 25% of firms account for 51% of leverage adjustments, while the least active 50% of firms account for only 19% of such events.…

In many important machine learning applications, the training distribution used to learn a probabilistic classifier differs from the testing distribution on which the classifier will be used to make predictions. Traditional methods correct the…

A major goal of the environmental movement is to conserve or improve the natural environment, but evidence showing that environmental mobilization produces positive environmental outcomes is mixed. This paper addresses a fundamental question…

The growth of the “gig” economy generates worker flexibility that, some have speculated, will favor women. We explore one facet of the gig economy by examining labor supply choices and earnings among more than a million rideshare drivers on Uber…

Millions of poor smallholder farmers produce global commodities, often through illegal deforestation. Multinational commodity buyers have committed to halt illegal deforestation and improve farmers’ livelihoods in their supply chains. We propose…

Individuals face significant late-in-life risks, including needing long-term care (LTC). Yet, they hold little long-term care insurance (LTCI). Using both “strategic survey questions,” which identify preferences, and stated demand questions, this…

Proxy advisory firms have significant influence over the voting decisions of institutional investors and the governance choices of publicly traded companies. However, it is not clear that the recommendations of these firms are correct and…

Much research in consumer psychology has investigated how affective reactions unrelated to a decision at hand (i.e., incidental affect) influence consumers’ preconsumption preferences. Most of this research has approximated the incidental affect…

Can participation in financial markets lead individuals to re-evaluate the costs of conflict, change their political attitudes and even their votes? Prior to the 2015 Israeli elections, we randomly assigned Palestinian and Israeli financial…

Crowd-sourced content in the form of online product reviews or recommendations is an integral feature of most Internet-based service platforms and marketplaces, including Yelp, TripAdvisor, Netflix, and Amazon. Customers may find such information…

How can we help individuals handle financial decisions in an increasingly complex environment? We explore an easily scalable avenue for improving financial understanding: learning by online trading in stocks. We randomly assign 1345 adults…

We study the evolution of risk premiums on US Treasury bonds from the perspective of a real-time Bayesian learner RA who updates her beliefs using a dynamic term structure model. Learning about the historical dynamics of yields led to…