Working Papers

The policy of net metering allows operators of residential- and commercial solar PV systems to sell surplus electricity back to their utility at the going retail rate. This policy has recently been criticized on the grounds that it provides a…

Revise and Resubmit at American Economic Review

I characterize the optimal financial regulation policy in an economy where financial intermediaries trade capital assets on behalf of households, but must retain an equity stake for…

This paper examines the relation between political connections and informed trading by corporate insiders in the context of the Financial Crisis. The unprecedented magnitude of government intervention, the substantial impact of this intervention…

We consider a two-sided assignment market with agent types and a stochastic structure, similar to models used in empirical studies. We characterize the size of the core in such markets. Each agent has a randomly drawn productivity with respect to…

We study whether the corporate tax system provides incentives for risky firm investment. We analytically and empirically show two main findings: first, risk-taking is positively related to the length of tax loss periods because the loss rules…

We use a new dataset that links the TV ad consumption behavior of a panel of consumers with their product choice behavior to measure the co-determination of demand for products and advertising. Leveraging the variation in the data, we assess how…

Framework agreements (FAs) are procurement mechanisms commonly used by buying agencies around the world to satisfy demand that arises over a certain time horizon. This paper is one of the first in the literature that provides a formal…

We analyze the classic problem of sustaining trust when cheating and leaving trading partners is easy, and outside enforcement is difficult. We construct equilibria where individuals are loyal to smaller groups– communities– that allow…

This paper develops a model of user adoption and use of virtual currency (such as Bitcoin), and focusing on the dynamics of adoption in the presence of frictions arising from exchange rate uncertainty. The theoretical model can be used…

We survey 885 institutional venture capitalists (VCs) at 681 firms to learn how they make decisions across eight areas: deal sourcing; investment selection; valuation; deal structure; post-investment value-added; exits; internal firm organization…

Based on two samples of high quality personality data for chief executive officers (CEOs), we use linguistic features extracted from conferences calls and statistical learning techniques to develop a measure of CEO personality in terms of the Big…

Size discovery is the use of trade mechanisms by which large quantities of an asset can be exchanged at a price that does not respond to price pressure. Primary examples of size discovery include “workup” in Treasury markets, “matching sessions”…

Rural electrification rates in India lag behind government goals, in part due to the inability of distribution companies (discoms) to fund central grid expansion. In the absence of central grid electrification, mini-grids offer significant…

We propose a new source of cross-sectional variation that may identify causal impacts of government spending on the economy. We use the fact that a large number of federal spending programs depend on local population levels. Every ten years, the…

Bargaining power allows equity holders to recover a fraction of residual assets in bankruptcy, therefore reducing their exposure to default risk. We develop an agency-based model and provide the first evidence via structural estimation that…

Equity is a cheap source of funding for a country’s largest financial institutions. In a large panel of 31 countries, we find that the stocks of a country’s largest financial companies earn returns that are significantly lower than stocks of non-…

We provide the first large-sample evidence of banks playing an important role in facilitating tax planning by client firms. Capturing bank-client relationships using lending contracts and measuring borrower tax avoidance with the three-year cash…

Under 2nd Review, Management Science

Women pursue managerial credentials at nearly the same rate as men but evidence suggests they receive lower salaries from the onset of their managerial careers. While demand-side…

This paper examines the effect of market participants’ information processing costs on firms’ disclosure choice. Using the recent extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) regulation as an exogenous shock to these information processing costs…