Publications

We investigate the effect of patent disclosures on corporate innovation. Using the American Inventor’s Protection Act (AIPA) as a shock that increased patent disclosures, we find an increase in innovation for firms whose rivals reveal more…

Viral outrage—the piling up of online condemnation in response to offensive remarks—is a common expression of moral judgment in the digital age. We examined whether viral outrage is effective in convincing observers that an offender is…

We show that household consumption displays excess sensitivity to salient macro-economic news. When the announced local unemployment rate reaches a 12-month maximum, local consumers in that area reduce discretionary spending by 2% relative to…

We study repeated games in which players learn the unknown state of the world by observing a sequence of noisy private signals. We find that for generic signal distributions, the folk theorem obtains using ex-post equilibria. In our…

In late 2008, the world’s financial system was teetering on the brink of systemic collapse. While the impacts of the global financial crisis would be felt immediately, at every level of the economy, it would also send years-long aftershocks…

We establish a link between firms managing investors’ performance expectations, earnings announcement premia, and cyclical patterns (i.e., seasonalities) in returns. Firms that are more likely to manage expectations toward beatable levels…

The market value of outstanding government debt reflects the expected present discounted value of current and future primary surpluses. When the discount rate is consistent with the term structure of interest rates and equity prices and…

Drawing on the universe of California income tax filings and the variation imposed by a 2012 tax increase of up to 3 percentage points for high-income households, we present new findings about the effects of personal income taxation on household…

We develop a field experiment that assesses whether advertising can serve as a signal that enhances consumers’ evaluations of advertised goods. We implement the experiment on a mobile search platform that provides listings and reviews for an…

In this paper, I develop a model in which risk-averse investors possess private information regarding both a stock’s expected payoff and its risk. These investors trade in the stock and a derivative whose payoff is driven by the stock’s risk. In…

We study firms that go public through reverse mergers (RMs) versus initial public offerings (IPOs) in China. Using a manually assembled data set, we show that pre-listing RM firms are larger, more profitable, and less politically connected than…

We study firms that go public through reverse mergers (RMs) versus initial public offerings …

People pursue goals throughout their lives, and many of these attempts end happily — a goal is achieved. However, what facilitates the continuation of behaviors that are aligned with the completed goal, such as continuing to monitor food intake…

A reliable system of corporate governance is considered to be an important requirement for the long-term success of a company. Unfortunately, after decades of research, we still do not have a clear understanding of the factors that make a…

Systemic risk arises when shocks lead to states where a disruption in financial intermediation adversely affects the economy and feeds back into further disrupting financial intermediation. We present a macroeconomic model with a financial…

We provide the first partner tenure and mandatory rotation analysis for a large cross-section of U.S. publicly listed firms over an extended period. We analyze the effects on audit quality as well as on audit pricing and production. On average,…

Four online grocery-shopping experiments and one field study using video-tracking technology at a grocery store document how shoppers’ motivation evolves from the beginning to the end of their shopping trips. We uncover unique motivational…

The current research introduces the concept of psychological ownership of money, the notion that consumers perceive money in differing degrees as their own. We suggest that this concept is particularly important in the realm of consumer debt,…

In vertically integrated energy systems, integration frequently entails operational gains that must be traded off against the requisite cost of capacity investments. In the context of the model analyzed in this study, the operational gains are…

Would giving party leaders more influence in primary elections in the United States decrease elite polarization? Some scholars have argued that political party leaders tend to support centrist candidates in the hopes of winning general elections…