Working Papers

Capital regulation is critical to address distortions and externalities from intense conflicts of interest in banking and from the failure of markets to counter incentives for recklessness. The approaches to capital regulation in Basel III and…

The prevalence and widespread usage of email has given businesses a direct and cost effective way of providing consumers with targeted discount offers. While these discounts are expected to increase the demand for the promoted products, are they…

Using ethnographic, experimental and survey data from an Indian handicraft cluster, this paper studies the conditions under which individuals who identify with their work prioritize financial rewards in their economic decisions. I argue that the…

The U.S. is one of the few countries in the world that delivers its food assistance mainly via transoceanic shipments of commodity-based in-kind food. This approach is more costly and less timely than cash-based assistance, which…

Researchers in accounting, corporate finance, economics, and law regularly evaluate the impact of corporate governance provisions on firm performance and managerial actions. Many of these studies rely on publicly available governance summaries…

Over the past 30 years, venture capital has become a dominant force in the financing of innovative American companies. From Google to Intel to FedEx, companies supported by venture capital have profoundly changed the U.S. economy. Despite…

Empirical work on asset prices suggests that pricing kernels have to be almost perfectly correlated across countries. If they are not, real exchange rates are too smooth to be consistent with high Sharpe ratios in asset markets. However, the…

Exchange rates strongly co-vary against their base currency. We uncover a gravity equation in this factor structure: the key determinant of a country’s exchange rate beta on the common base factor is the country’s distance from the base country.…

The extreme fragility of the financial system that gives rise to systemic risk and crises is rooted in the incentives of people within this system and the failure of regulation to counter these incentives. The same forces that increase systemic…

Political institutions often use decision making procedures that create veto players—individuals or groups who, despite lacking direct decision making authority, nevertheless have the power to  block policy change. In this paper we…

This paper documents complex strategic integration (CSI) at Nike that helped drive the company toward developing a global women’s fitness business, which extended the corporate strategy and required collaboration of multiple business units. The…

We examine the ability of the government to impact mortgage refinancing activity and spur consumption by focusing on the Home Affordable Refinancing Program (HARP). The policy allowed intermediaries to refinance insufficiently collateralized…

A recurring theme in sociological research is the tradeoff between fitting in and standing out. Prior work examining this tension has tended to take either a network structural or a cultural perspective. We instead fuse these two traditions to…

A state with climate policy may impose a tax on imported products for greenhouse gas emissions that occur in production and transportation to its border (a so-called border adjustment). A buyer may voluntarily commit to …

Local stock markets adjust sluggishly to changes in local inflation. When the local rate of inflation increases, local investors subsequently earn significantly lower real returns on local stocks, but not on local bonds or foreign stocks. Our…

Regional shocks are an important feature of the U.S. economy. Households’ ability to self-insure against these shocks depends on how they affect local interest rates. In the U.S., most borrowing occurs through the mortgage market and is…

We investigate the effect of social media advertising content on customer engagement using a large-scale field study on Facebook. We content-code more than 100,000 unique messages across 800 companies using a combination of Amazon Mechanical Turk…

Observed contracts in the real-world are often very simple, partly reflecting the constraints faced by contracting firms in making the contracts more complex. We focus on one such rigidity, the constraints faced by firms in fine-tuning contracts…

From 1980 to 2000, the rise in the U.S. college-high school graduate wage gap coincided with increased geographic sorting as college graduates concentrated in high wage, high rent cities. This paper estimates a structural spatial equilibrium…