Publications

Health insurance holds the promise of improving population health and survival and protecting people from catastrophic health spending. Yet evidence from lower- and middle-income countries on the impact of health insurance is limited. We…

Ballistic imaging systems can help solve crimes by comparing images of cartridge cases, which are recovered from a crime scene or test-fired from a gun, to a database of images obtained from past crime scenes. Many U.S. municipalities lack the…

I discuss the role of debt in financial crises and macroprudential tools to manage debt. A principal conclusion is that changes in mortgage contract designs, an ex ante measure aimed at the household sector, can deliver significant welfare…

Companies that source from emerging economies often face supplier responsibility risks, namely, financial and reputational burdens that the companies have to bear when their suppliers’ engagement in noncomplying labor and environmental practices…

Our analysis of how banks’ responses to asset price changes can result in procyclical leverage reveals that, for banks with a binding regulatory leverage constraint, absent differences in regulatory risk weights across assets, procyclical…

Contracts are commonly used to regulate a wide range of interactions and relationships. Yet relying on contracts as a mechanism of control often comes at a cost to motivation. Integrating theoretical perspectives from psychology, economics, and…

This paper tackles the intersection of two trends, the increasing prevalence of flat, so-called horizontal organizations and the greater gender diversity of the workers that such organizations employ. We investigate why these organizations may be…

The article reports that the Bank of England has launched the Decision Maker Panel (DMP) survey of senior executives from British companies which aims to measure the effects of uncertainty on business decision-making. Topics discussed include the…

Online college courses are a rapidly expanding feature of higher education, yet little research identifies their effects relative to traditional in-person classes. Using an instrumental variables approach, we find that taking a course online,…

The ways in which we discuss gender (embracing vs. downplaying difference) has implications for women’s workplace confidence and behavior, especially in male-dominated environments and positions of power. In five total studies (N = 1453…

Business schools teach MBA students that you can’t compete on the basis of management processes because they’re easily copied. Operational effectiveness is table stakes in the competitive universe, according to the strategists. But data from a…

Is top-down organization design worth attempting at all, or should organizations simply let their members learn which patterns of interaction are valuable by themselves, through a bottom-up process? Our analysis of an agent-based computational…

Politicians are widely perceived to lose significance upon leaving office. Yet media accounts often highlight politicians’ legacies as a source of influence that endures even after they retire. This article assesses these contrasting views by…

Recent advances in advertising technology have lead to the development of “native advertising”, which is a format of advertising that mimics the other non-sponsored content on the medium. While advertisers have rapidly embraced the format on a…

Leading research is converging upon the finding that citizens from immigrant-receiving nations strongly prefer the entry of high-skilled to low-skilled immigrants. Prior studies have largely interpreted this “skill premium” as deriving from…

We establish an important role for the firm by studying capital reallocation decisions of mutual fund firms. The firm’s decision to reallocate capital among its mutual fund managers adds at least $474,000 a month, which amounts to over 30% of the…

Religious affiliation is an important identifying characteristic for many individuals and relates to numerous life outcomes including health, well-being, policy positions, and cognitive style. Using methods from computational linguistics, we…

Most Americans recognize that smoking causes serious diseases, yet many Americans continue to smoke. One possible explanation for this paradox is that perhaps Americans do not accurately perceive the extent to which smoking increases the…

Many irreversible long-run capital investments entail opportunities for managers to respond flexibly to changes in the economic environment. However, common levelized cost measures used to guide decision-making, such as the levelized cost of…