Publications

I show that, in a benchmark model, debt securities minimize the welfare losses associated with the moral hazards of excessive risk-taking and lax effort. For any security design, the variance of the security payoff is a statistic that summarizes…

In summer and fall 2018, the Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University conducted a nationwide survey of 3,544 individuals — representative by gender, race, age, household income, and state residence — to understand how the…

We examine whether firms have an informational advantage in selecting arbitrators in consumer arbitration, and the impact of the arbitrator selection process on outcomes. We collect a novel data set containing roughly 9,000 arbitration cases in…

Network models of diffusion predominantly think about cultural variation as a product of social contagion. But culture does not spread like a virus. We propose an alternative explanation we call associative…

Entrepreneurship requires energy and creativity as well as business acumen. Some factors that contribute to entrepreneurship decline with age, but business skills increase with experience in high-level positions. Having too many older workers in…

This chapter discusses the insights yielded by studies examining inter- and intra-movement diffusion, with an eye toward understanding what diffuses, through which channels, and the catalysts to the diffusion process. It also discusses the…

We reassess Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels’s prominent claim that shark attacks influence presidential elections. First, we assemble data on every fatal shark attack in U.S. history and county-level returns from every presidential election…

This is a survey of progress with the postcrisis global (G20) reform of the financial system, in five key areas of new regulation: (1) making financial institutions more resilient; (2) ending “too-big-to-fail”; (3) making derivatives markets…

The article focuses on the life and works of American economist and social scientist Gary Becker, who believed that economics could and should tackle serious social problems. According to the author, Becker’s approach was to extend the boundaries…

Certain markets are illicit because the supply is partly coerced, but little is known about the optimal regulation of such markets. We model a prostitution market with voluntary and coerced prostitutes and ask what regulation can restore…

We study a nutrition-sensitive agricultural program in low-income rural Zambia between 2011 and 2015. Using a pre-post design with a control group, we measure program effects along established pathways connecting agriculture to nutrition:…

Top income inequality rose sharply in the United States over the last 40 years but increased only slightly in France and Japan. Why? We explore a model in which heterogeneous entrepreneurs, broadly interpreted, exert effort to generate…

Concave hiring rules imply that firms respond more to bad shocks than to good shocks. They provide a unified explanation for several seemingly unrelated facts about employment growth in macro- and microdata. In particular, they generate…

Competence and sociability (warmth) are fundamental dimensions of social judgment in organizations. However, these qualities are frequently seen as negatively related, with mixed evidence on which is more important. In three studies (N = 993), we…

We study which types of activities migrate to the shadow banking sector, why migration occurs in some sectors, and not others, and the quantitative importance of this migration. We explore this question in the $10 trillion US residential mortgage…

Moral outrage has traditionally served a valuable social function, expressing group values and inhibiting deviant behavior, but the exponential dynamics of Internet postings make this expression of legitimate individual outrage appear excessive…

Artificial intelligence has been touted as a technology with great promise for value chain improvements. This paper shares our understanding of how AI can improve various stages in the value chain, provides insight on how to design business…

When people seek to persuade others to purchase a particular product or service, they often give an extremely favorable review of it as a means of doing so. Despite the intuitive appeal of this strategy, the current research demonstrates…

Two salient features of most online platforms are that they do not dictate the transaction prices, and use commissions/subscriptions for extracting revenues. We consider a platform that charges commission rates and subscription fees to sellers…

We study the dynamic mechanism design problem of a seller that repeatedly auctions independent items over a discrete time horizon to buyers that face a cumulative budget constraint. A driving motivation behind our model is the emergence of real-…