Working Papers

American politics overrepresents the wealthy. But what policies do the wealthy support? Many accounts implicitly assume the wealthy are monolithically conservative and that increases in their political power will increase inequality. Instead, we…

In some developing nations, many end-stage renal disease (ESRD) patients die because the costs of kidney transplantation and dialysis are beyond the reach of most citizens. In this paper, we analyze two proposals for extending kidney exchange to…

Hydrogen has long been heralded as a potentially critical element in the transition to a low carbon economy. The recent sharp cost declines for renewable energy raise the question whether an economic case can be made to produce hydrogen from…

I consider the sequential implementation of a target information structure. I characterize the set of decision time distributions induced by all signal processes that satisfy a per-period learning capacity constraint. I find that all decision…

We measure credit risk premia, meaning the price for bearing corporate default risk in excess of expected default losses, using Markit CDS and Moody’s Analytics EDF data. We find dramatic variation over time in credit risk premia, with peaks in…

The board of directors is expected to ensure that management has identified and developed processes to mitigate risks facing the organization, including risks arising from data theft and the loss of information. Unfortunately, recent experience…

This paper studies the welfare effects of a ‘partial banking union’ in which cross-country …financial transfers that could be used towards bailouts are decided at the supranational level, but policymakers in member countries hold…

We consider a cheap talk setting with two senders and a continuum of receivers with heterogeneous preferences. Receivers listen to just one sender, but can choose which sender to listen to. We determine that: (i) full communication is possible…

This study examines the factors contributing to a striking increase in information content of quarterly earnings announcements, measured as the absolute magnitude of stock price revision at earnings announcements relative to price revision at…

Firms’ inability to commit to future funding choices has profound consequences for capital structure dynamics. With debt in place, shareholders pervasively resist leverage reductions no matter how much such reductions may enhance firm value.…

We extend the emergent lens on strategy formulation by arguing that great strategies arise from insurgent identity movements. In motivating the paper, we depict Steve Jobs as an activist constituted by the personal computing movement that…

We study how debt frictions and demand affect corporate investment using administrative data from a large temporary investment tax credit in Portugal. We obtain exogenous variation in demand for exporting firms from product-destination-level…

This paper contributes to a recent thrust in the OM literature on how various sorts of transparency influence social and environmental responsibility in a supply chain. In practice, companies are under pressure to publish their supplier lists and…

This paper finds evidence of return predictability across technology-linked firms.  Employing a classic measure of technological closeness between firms, we show that the returns of technology-linked firms have strong predictive power for…

In empirical work in economics it is common to report standard errors that account for clustering of units. Typically, the motivation given for the clustering adjustments is that unobserved components in outcomes for units within clusters are…

We examine the long-term consequences of teacher discretion in grading of high stakes tests. Bunching in Swedish math test score distributions reveal that teachers inflate students who have “a bad test day,” but do not discriminate based on…

We use trade-level data to examine the role of mutual funds (MFs) in earnings news dissemination. MFs trade (172%) more on earnings announcement (EA) days than on non-EA days. The EA trades made by MFs are reliably more profitable than their non-…

Accepted at American Economic Review

Fixing the investment horizon, the returns to currency carry trades decrease as the maturity of the foreign bonds increases, because the local currency term premia offset the currency risk…

Word embeddings are a powerful approach for analyzing language, and exponential family embeddings (EFE) extend them to other types of data. Here we develop structured exponential family embeddings (S-EFE), a method for discovering embeddings that…