Working Papers

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…

I examine the conditions under which trade can support peaceful coexistence and prosperity when particular ethnic groups are cheap targets of violence. A simple theoretical framework reveals that for a broad set of cases, while inter-ethnic…

Commercial radio spectrum use rights in the US are traditionally assigned using licenses over large geographic areas with 10- or 15-year terms, to encourage infrastructure investment. However, such long-term licenses are difficult to reassign as…

We evaluate the effects of three ECB policies (the Securities Markets Programme, the Outright Monetary Transactions, and the Long-Term Refinancing Operations) on government bond yields.  We use a novel Kalman-filter augmented event-study…

Classic arguments for decentralization, augmented by ideas about how participation empowers the poor, motivate the widely used approach in foreign aid called community-driven development.  CDD devolves control over the selection,…

Using a comprehensive sample of reverse merger (RM) transactions, we examine the effects of China’s IPO regulations on the prices and returns of its publicly listed stocks. During 2007-2015, unlisted Chinese firms paid an average of 3 to 4…

Given the promise of 3D printing, also known as additive manufacturing, some innovative consumer goods companies have started to experiment with such a technology for on-demand production. However, the potential impact of 3D printing on retail…

We model a firm’s optimal capital structure decision in a framework in which it may later choose to enter either Chapter 11 reorganization or Chapter 7 liquidation. Creditors anticipate equityholders’ ex-post reorganization incentives and price…

In many growth models, economic growth arises from people creating ideas, and the long-run growth rate is the product of two terms: the effective number of researchers and their research productivity. We present a wide range of evidence from…