Working Papers

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…

The federal Investment Tax Credit (ITC) for solar installations is scheduled to step-down from 30% to 10% at the beginning of 2017 for corporate investors. This raises the question whether solar PV will be cost competitive post 2016 in the U.S.…

We use a dataset of sell-side analysts’ scenario-based equity valuation estimates to examine whether analysts can assess the state-contingent risk surrounding a firm’s fundamental value. We find that the spread in analysts’ scenario-based…

Using a unique dataset of scenario-based investment reports, we examine whether the placement of an analyst’s valuation forecast, relative to his/her own subjective assessment of the distribution of scenario-based valuations for the covered firm…

Economic sociologists agree that economic rationality is constructed and that morality and economic interests often intersect. Yet we know little about how Americans organize their economic beliefs or assess the morality of markets. We…

In a noisy rational expectations framework with costly information, some agents expend resources to become informed, and earn a return for their efforts by trading with the uninformed. Applying this insight, we examine the proposition that an…

Governments may extract rent from private citizens by inflating taxes and spending on projects which benefit special interests. Using a spatial equilibrium model, I show that less elastic housing supplies increase governments’ abilities to…

We present a theory of dynamic coalitions for a legislative bargaining game in which policies continue in effect in the absence of new legislation. We characterize Markov perfect equilibria with dynamic coalitions, which are decisive sets of…

We examine the economic determinants of short-sale supply, and its consequences for future stock returns.  Lendable supply increases with expected borrowing costs and decreases with financial statement constructs that indicate overvaluation…

Under revision for Econometrica

This paper studies U.S. banks’ exposure to interest rate and credit risk. We exploit the factor structure in interest rates to represent many bank positions in terms of simple factor portfolios.…

We estimate the spillovers of properties financed by the Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) onto surrounding neighborhood residents. We nonparametrically estimate the impact of LIHTC development on nearby house prices by developing a new…

U.S. CEOs hold a large amount of equity that is not explicitly constrained by ownership guidelines or vesting requirements. Although the average CEO receives a risk premium in his annual pay for holding unconstrained equity, most CEOs hold more…

Research suggests that finding and hiring the right workers may be as important to firms as managing workers after they join organizations.  However, hiring the right workers is difficult.  In this paper trial employment is examined as…