Working Papers

Bekaert, Harvey and Lundblad (BHL) are to be congratulated for producing another paper on equity market liberalizations in emerging markets, and it is a pleasure to discuss their work. Yet, there are three reasons why I may not be an impartial…

Interest groups seek to influence economic activity through public and private politics. Public politics takes place in the arenas of public institutions, whereas private politics takes place outside public institutions often in the arena of…

In an integration of just world and system justification theories, it was hypothesized that exposure to complementary representations of the poor as happier and more honest than the rich would satisfy the justice motive and lead to an increase in…

How do rational firms respond to consumer biases? In this paper, we analyze the profit-maximizing contract design of firms if consumers have time-inconsistent preferences and are partially naive about it. We consider markets for two types of…

In a preliminary study with 279 MBAs from two European and three North American business schools we find that reputation-related attributes of caring about employees, environmental sustainability, community/ stakeholder relations, and ethical…

The stock market appreciates by an average of 60 percent in real dollar terms when countries announce debt relief agreements under the Brady Plan. In contrast, there is no significant increase in market value for a control group of countries that…

We study the electricity consumption of San Diego-area households following a series of price changes and related events during California’s energy crisis in 2000-01. The analysis uses a five-year panel of disaggregate billing and weather data…

This paper is an empirical assessment of the comparative efficiency of governance structures in an environment marked by high uncertainty. We analyze the short-term impact of retail deregulation on the productive efficiency of electric utilities…

Over the past decade, marketers have been challenged by proponents of individual marketing (e.g., one-to-one marketing, mass customization, personalization) to shift from a focus on market segments to making individually customized offers.…

Application of the Coase Theorem to marital bargaining suggests that shifting from a consent divorce regime to no-fault unilateral divorce laws should not affect divorce rates. Each iteration of the empirical literature examining the evolution of…

Analyzing 50 years of inflation expectations data from several sources, we document substantial disagreement among both consumers and professional economists about expected future inflation. Moreover, this disagreement shows substantial variation…

Contrary to the predictions of standard economic theory, capital market liberalization has been a mixed blessing for many countries. Liberalization of debt inflows exposes economies to the risk of crises stemming from sudden changes in investor…

Social science theories can become self-fulfilling because they shape institutional designs and management practices as well as social norms and expectations about behavior, thereby creating the behavior they predict. Social theories also…

In a choice between any two options, decision makers can be divided into three segments: those who strongly prefer the first option, those who strongly prefer the second option, and those who might choose either option depending on the particular…

It has been argued that seemingly benevolent and complementary gender stereotypes serve to maintain or increase support for the system of gender inequality, especially among women. In prior work, support for this hypothesis has been indirectly…

Multidivisional firms frequently rely on external market prices in order to value internal transactions across profit centers. This paper examines market-based transfer pricing when an upstream division has monopoly power in selling a proprietary…

Public opinion research shows that most people espouse egalitarian ideals and acknowledge substantial income inequality in society, but they consistently perceive the economic system to be highly fair and legitimate. In an attempt to better…

This paper extends transaction costs economics to analyze relationships between firms and regulatory agencies. It compares the economic efficiency of firm-agency governance structures for dealing with pollution reduction. The transaction costs of…

This study investigates factors associated with firms decisions in 2002 and early 2003 to recognize stock-based compensation expense under Statement of Financial Accounting Standards (SFAS) No. 123. We find that the likelihood of SFAS 123 expense…

We show that hedonic price indexes may be biased when not all product characteristics are observed. We derive two primary sources of bias. The first is a classical selection problem that arises due to changes over time in the values of unobserved…