Working Papers

Traditional economic analysis of markets with asymmetric information assumes that uninformed agents account for the incentives of informed agents to distort information. We analyze whether investors in the stock market internalize such incentives…

This paper uses detailed weekly data on sales of hardcover fiction books to evaluate the impact of the New York Times bestseller list on sales and product variety. In order to circumvent the obvious problem of simultaneity of sales and bestseller…

We study security-bid auctions in which bidders compete for an asset by bidding with securities. That is, they offer payments that are contingent on the realized value of the asset being sold. Such auctions are commonly used, both formally and…

This research demonstrates that people’s goals associated with regulatory focus moderate the effect of message framing on persuasion. The results of six experiments show that appeals presented in gain frames are more persuasive when the message…

This paper describes a dynamic analysis of technological advances among hard disk drive (HDD) manufacturers in the areal density of their products across the history of the industry. The study provides (additional) evidence supporting a view of…

In the context of introducing new products around the world, it is important to understand the relative attractiveness of various countries in terms of maximum penetration potential and diffusion speed. In this paper, we examine these market…

We develop a new approach to measuring changes in consumer welfare due to changes in the price of owner-occupied housing. In our approach, an agents welfare adjustment is defined as the transfer required to keep expected discounted utility…

Which of the democratic checks and balances opposition parties, the judiciary, a free press is the most critical? Peru has the full set of democratic institutions. In the 1990s, the secret-police chief Montesinos systematically undermined them…

A manufacturer writes supply contracts with N buyers. Then, the buyers invest in innovation, and the manufacturer builds capacity. Finally, demand is realized, and the firms renegotiate the supply contracts to achieve an efficient allocation of…

After entering into supply contracts, firms often later renegotiate the terms of those contracts. For example, firms that obtain market demand information after signing supply contracts may benefit by renegotiating the contracts to allow buyers…

We confront the two opposing views of capital account liberalization in developing countries with a new firm-level dataset on investment, stock prices, and sales. In the three-year period following liberalizations, the growth rate of the typical…

The minority party is rarely featured in empirical research on parties in legislatures, and recent theories of parties in legislatures are rarely neutral and balanced in their treatment of the two parties. This paper makes a case for redressing…

While leaders need analytical competencies such as those associated with strategy, finance and all the planning processes, research on Emotional Intelligence (as reported by Goleman, “What Makes a Leader?”, HBR, 1998) suggests it is increasingly…

A framework is introduced for evaluating static micro-analytic theories in dynamic macro-political settings. Within the framework, two theories of lawmaking are compared. Analytically, the predictions of the theories are remarkably similar-…

Using Monte Carlo simulations, this paper evaluates the bias properties of common estimators used in growth regressions derived from the Solow model. We explicitly allow for measurement error in the right-hand side variables, as well as country-…

Organizational culture Organizational culture is embedded in the everyday working lives of all cultural members. Manifestations of cultures in organizations include formal practices (such as pay levels, structure of the HIERARCHY,JOB DESCRIPTIONS…

Political parties are active when citizens choose among candidates in elections, and when winning candidates choose among policy alternatives in government. But the inextricably linked institutions, incentives, and behavior that determine these…

This paper considers two firms that engage in joint production. The prospect of repeated interaction introduces dynamics in that actions that firms take today influence the costliness and effectiveness of actions in the future. Repeated…

The news media plays an essential role in society, but surveys indicate that the public views the media as biased. This paper presents a theory of media bias that originates with private information obtained by journalists through their…