Working Papers

How can mortgages be redesigned to reduce housing market volatility, consumption volatility, and default? How does mortgage design interact with monetary policy? We answer these questions using a quantitative equilibrium life cycle model with…

We find the value relevance of accounting information has increased between 1962 and 2014. The information we consider comprises twelve accounting amounts plus ten industry indicators. Regarding individual accounting amounts, we find that…

Cultural fit is widely believed to affect the success of individuals and the groups to which they belong. Yet it remains an elusive, poorly measured construct. Recent research draws on computational linguistics to measure cultural fit but…

This study finds that greater asymmetric timeliness of earnings is associated with slower resolution of investor disagreement and uncertainty at earnings announcements. These findings indicate that a potential cost of asymmetric timeliness is…

We study the rise of fintech and non-fintech shadow banks in the residential lending market. The market share of shadow banks in the mortgage market has nearly tripled from 2007-2015. Shadow banks gained a larger market share among less…

Among stock market entrants, more firms over time are R&D–intensive with initially lower profitability but higher growth potential. This sample-selection effect determines the secular trend in U.S. public firms’ cash holdings. A stylized firm…

This paper empirically examines recently declassified data from the GATT/WTO on tariff bargaining. Focusing on the Torquay Round (1950-51), we document six stylized facts about these interconnected high-stakes international negotiations.…

We examine gender discrimination in the financial advisory industry. We study a less salient mechanism for discrimination, firm discipline following missteps. There are substantial differences in the punishment of misconduct across genders.…

Daily directional trading by mutual funds (MFs) is highly-persistent and price-destabilizing, leading to return reversals lasting months.  This effect is distinct from the “flow-induced trading” phenomenon in prior studies.  At the same…

Efforts on developing, implementing and evaluating a marketing analytics framework at a real-world company are described. The framework uses individual-level transaction data to fit empirical models of consumer response to marketing efforts, and…

Why might a country choose to aggregate regulatory information into a single government agency? And what might reverse this choice? We consider an oversight setting in which the institutional structure affects access to information. A regulator…

Using a large sample of business groups from several countries around the world, we show that group information matters for parent and subsidiary default prediction. Group firms may support each other when in financial distress. Potential group…

We provide an equilibrium analysis of the efficiency properties of bilateral tariff negotiations in a three-country, two-good general equilibrium model of international trade when transfers are not feasible. We consider “weak-rules” …

Our analytical description of how banks’ responses to asset price changes can result in procyclical leverage reveals that for banks with a binding regulatory leverage constraint, absent differences in regulatory risk weights across assets,…

Empirical and survey evidence suggest that firms often manipulate reported numbers to avoid debt covenant violations. The theoretical literature, by and large, has ignored the consequences of this phenomenon on debt contracting. Departing from a…

A policy debate centers around the question whether news aggregators such as Google News decrease or increase traffic to online news sites. One side of the debate, typically espoused by publishers, views aggregators as substitutes for traditional…

We propose a method for non-parametric statistical estimation, based on random forests (Breiman, 2001), that can be used to fit any heterogeneous parameter of interest identified as the solution to a set of local estimating equations. Following…

This study examines the effect of the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act (JOBS Act) on information uncertainty in IPO firms. The JOBS Act creates a new category of issuer, the Emerging Growth Company (EGC), and exempts EGCs from several…

I investigate the effect of competition on bidder behavior and procurement cost using highway auction data from Michigan. While a bidder’s distance to a project location is important in explaining participation and bid levels, there is no…