Publications

Firms’ inability to commit to future funding choices has profound consequences for capital structure dynamics. With debt in place, shareholders pervasively resist leverage reductions no matter how much such reductions may enhance firm value.…

We document the economywide extent of misconduct among financial advisers and the associated labor market consequences. Seven percent of advisers have misconduct records, and this share reaches more than 15 percent at some of the largest firms.…

Institutional investors rely on past performance in setting future return expectations, and these extrapolative expectations affect their target asset allocations. Drawing on newly-required disclosures for U.S. public pension funds, a group that…

Classic arguments for decentralization, augmented by ideas about how participation empowers the poor, motivate the widely used approach in foreign aid called community-driven development.  CDD devolves control over the selection,…

We explore spatial price discrimination in the context of a ride-sharing platform that serves a network of locations. Riders are heterogeneous in terms of their destination preferences and their willingness to pay for receiving service. Drivers…

We study the causes of “nutritional inequality”: why the wealthy tend to eat more healthfully than the poor in the U.S. Using two event study designs exploiting entry of new supermarkets and households’ moves to healthier neighborhoods, we reject…

This paper provides a dynamic theory of a parliamentary government system with proportional-representation elections, policy-motivated parties and voters, and an endogenous status-quo policy. The theory identifies the representation of parties in…

I evaluate the role of accrual accounting in improving rms’ production decisions and resource allocation across rms. I introduce both cash ow and accounting earnings as imperfect measures of performance into a general equilibrium model with…

Psychological certainty has been the subject of a great deal of research across a number of different literatures. This review focuses on prior and ongoing research on attitude certainty—the subjective sense of confidence of conviction a…

This article examines how cultural matching relates to a job applicant’s likelihood of getting hired into an organization and identifies the components of cultural similarity that matter most for hiring success. Cultural compatibility at…

We find new facts that relate the evolution of firm scope to the changing frictions in external capital markets over the last three decades. We find that large, diversified publicly traded firms increase their scope during times of high external…

Concerns that interest groups use their financial resources to distort the democratic process are long-standing. Surprisingly, though, firms spend little money on political campaigns, and roughly 95% of publicly traded firms in the United States…

The United Nations approach to climate policy is and has been to focus on emission caps. Since emission of greenhouse gases is the direct cause of human-made climate change, capping country-specific emissions may at first appear to be a precise…

It has been well documented that the dispersion of income within most countries has grown over time. Dispersion can be a reflection of some positive features of an economy, most notably, increased returns to investing in skills. It is…

In a little over two decades, the Journal of Consumer Psychology has rapidly risen to become a premier research outlet. Under Pechmann and Kirmani’s excellent stewardship, the number of submissions has grown from 336 in 2010 to 483 in 2016 — a 43…

We study the relationship among productivity, management practices, and employee ability using German data combining management practices surveys with employees’ longitudinal earnings records. Including human capital reduces the association…

We study contracting for a three-tier supply chain consisting of a buyer, a supplier, and a sub-supplier where disruptions of random length occur at the sub-supplier. As is common in supply chains, the buyer has a direct relationship with the…

The preference for morality in others is regarded as a dominant factor in person perception. Moral traits are thought to foster liking, and immoral traits are thought to foster disliking, irrespective of the context in which they are embedded. We…

How people think about and use their time has critical implications for happiness and well-being. Extant research on time in the consumer behavior literature reveals a predominantly dichotomized perspective of time between the present and future…

In this state-of-the-art textbook, a distinguished team of established experts and rising scholars discuss the legacy of the Obama years and the impact of the unexpected Trump presidential victory of 2016. Carrying on the tradition set by its…