Publications

Two assumptions guide the current research. First, people’s desire to see themselves as moral disposes them to make attributions that enhance or protect their moral self-image: When approached with a prosocial request, people are inclined to…

Recent work suggests that in addition to actual attitudes, people often have desired attitudes that can vary in their congruence with their actual attitudes. We explored whether desired attitudes motivate goal-congruent outcomes by impacting…

CEO succession at many companies occurs in a black box. Shareholders are not privy to boardroom discussions prior to the announcement of a CEO departure, and press releases announcing the change contain boilerplate language that does not make it…

Using hand-collected data on divisional managers at conglomerates, we find that a change in industry surplus in one division generates large spillovers on managerial payoffs in other divisions of the same firm. These spillovers arise only…

Beginning in the mid-2000s, the incidence of drug shortages rose, especially for generic injectable drugs such as anesthetics and chemotherapy treatments. We examine whether reimbursement changes contributed to the shortages, focusing on a…

In this paper, we discuss recent developments in econometrics that we view as important for empirical researchers working on policy evaluation questions. We focus on three main areas, in each case, highlighting recommendations for applied work.…

We show that analyst coverage proxies contain information about expected returns. We decompose analyst coverage into abnormal and expected components using a simple characteristic-based model and show that firms with abnormally high analyst…

Yuliy Sannikov is an extraordinary theorist who has developed methods that offer new insights in analyzing problems that had seemed well-studied and familiar: for example, decisions that might bring about cooperation and/or defection in a…

We address whether firms manage stock prices in anticipation of share issuances. A literature in finance attributes negative returns following share issuances to market timing, whereas studies in accounting interpret similar return patterns as…

We study the inefficiencies stemming from a firm’s operating flexibility under debt. We find that flexibility in replenishing or liquidating inventory, by providing risk-shifting incentives, could lead to borrowing costs that erase more than one-…

We show that bond factors, which predict future U.S. economic activity at business cycle horizons, are priced in the cross-section of U.S. stock returns. High book-to-market stocks have larger exposures to these bond factors than low book-to-…

Although the aggregate capital share for U.S. firms has increased, the firm-level capital share has decreased on average. The divergence is due to the largest firms. While these mega-firms now produce a larger output share, their labor…

We measure the persuasive effects of slanted news and tastes for like-minded news, exploiting cable channel positions as exogenous shifters of cable news viewership. Channel positions do not correlate with demographics that predict viewership and…

A core claim of sociological theory is that modern institutions fall short of their meritocratic ideals, whereby rewards should be allocated based on achievement-related criteria. Instead, high-status actors often experience a “status advantage…

Understanding CEO compensation plans is a continuing challenge for directors and investors. The disclosure of these plans is dictated by SEC rules that rely heavily on the “fair value” of awards at the time they are granted. The problem with…

Based on a large sample of publicly listed and non-listed US commercial banks from 1996 to 2011, we find robust evidence consistent with banks using realized available for sale (AFS) securities gains and losses to smooth earnings and increase low…

Every summer and fall, freshly minted MBAs and MBA summer interns take new positions at companies. We analyze whether their choices have any predictive power on the success of those companies. We show that MBAs tend to join companies that have…

This paper examines whether increases in bank competition reduce discriminatory practices in mortgage lending. Lenders are significantly less likely to approve Black applicants’ loan applications despite facing similar credit risk. However,…

This Research Spotlight provides a summary of the academic literature on the impact of equity ownership on firm performance and agency problems:

• The relation between equity ownership and performance
• The relation between…

We consider a project supply chain where a manufacturer carries out a sequence of tasks, and each task requires certain key materials from a supplier. Since a fixed-price contract cannot attain channel coordination, we focus on time-based…