Working Papers

I present a theory of optimal multilateral trade agreements with public political shocks. I first show that forbearance - where one country withholds retaliation when its trading partner receives a shock - is a feature of an optimal agreement.…

Tariff bindings and administered protection are two characteristics of the WTO that are little understood. Tariff bindings place a ceiling on tariffs that is not always reached, while administered protection ensures that all sectors have access…

The failure to align the incentives of self-interested groups in favor of beneficial reform is often considered a major cause of persistent underdevelopment around the world. However, much less is known about strategies that have been successful…

This paper explores the impact of investor flows and financial market conditions on returns in crude-oil futures markets. I begin with a review of the economic mechanisms by which informational frictions and the associated speculative…

I am grateful for comments from Viral Acharya, Lewis Alexander, Niki Anderson, Peter Axilrod, Dick Berner, Markus Brunnermeier, Stacey Coleman, Rob Engle, Mike Fishman, Mark Flood, John Gidman, Tobi Guldimann, Anil Kashyap, John Khambu, Arvind…

Using an extensive longitudinal data set on franchising firms, we show that established franchisors manage their portfolio of company and franchised units to maintain a particular target level of corporate control and ownership of outlets. On…

The U.S. tri-party repo market is used by major broker-dealers to finance their securities inventories. During the financial crisis of 2007-2009, particularly around the failures of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, it became apparent that this…

Marketing researchers have used models of consumer demand to forecast future sales; to describe and test theories of behavior; and to measure the response to marketing interventions. The basic framework typically starts from microfoundations of…

We prove that there exist equilibrium payoffs arbitrarily close to the efficient payoff in the two-player prisoner’s dilemma with low discounting under imperfect private monitoring, provided that the monitoring structure is not too uninformative…

We examine the impact of Chinese import competition on patenting, IT, R&D, and TFP using a panel of up to half a million firms over 1996–2007 across twelve European countries. We correct for endogeneity using the removal of product-specific…

We estimate advertising effects in the context of presidential elections. This setting overcomes many data challenges in previous advertising studies, while arguably providing one of the most interesting empirical settings to study advertising’s…

Gambling and gaming is a very large industry in the United States with about one-third of all adults participating in it on a regular basis. Using novel and unique behavioral data from a panel of casino gamblers, this paper investigates three…

This paper illustrates a practical framework for understanding and predicting political economy risk for project managers operating in a variety of developing country settings, including non-democracies, ethnically diverse environments and…

Prosper, the largest online social lending marketplace with over a million members and $207 million in funded loans, uses an auction amongst lenders to finance each loan. In each auction, the borrower specifies D, the amount he wants to borrow,…

We impose three conditions on refinements of the Nash equilibria of finite games with perfect recall that select closed connected subsets, called solutions.
A. Each equilibrium in a solution uses undominated strategies;
B. Each solution…

Discrete games of complete information have been used to analyze a variety of contexts such as market entry, technology adoption and peer effects. They are extensions of discrete choice models, where payoffs of each player are dependent on…

Longitudinal qualitative research combining grounded theorizing and insights from modern historical methods can generate novel conceptual frameworks that establish theoretical bridges between historical narratives and reductionist quantitative…

A general finding in economic and organizational sociology states that producers and products that span categories lose appeal to audiences. This paper argues that to assess the consequences of category spanning researchers need to take account…

Although a substantial amount of research has examined the constructs of warmth and competence, far less has examined how these constructs develop and what benefits may accrue when warmth and competence are cultivated. Yet there are positive…

Why do organizations generally lose their competitive edge as they get older? Recent theory and research on the dynamics of audiences and categories in markets sheds some new light on issues of organizational obsolescence.