Publications

Firms are increasingly looking to eradicate social and environmental non-compliances at their suppliers in response to increasing regulations, consumer demand, potential for supply chain disruptions, and to improve their social, environmental,…

This commentary reviews the current status of the global use of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) and offers thoughts on the prospects for truly global financial reporting. The shift towards global use of IFRS is one of the…

This paper aims to understand the impact of temporal spacing between ad exposures on the likelihood of a consumer purchasing the advertised product. I create an individual-level data set with exogenous variation in ad exposure and its spacing by…

Facebook is rapidly gaining recognition as a powerful research tool for the social sciences. It constitutes a large and diverse pool of participants, who can be selectively recruited for both online and offline studies. Additionally, it…

I am delighted to be asked to give the Colston Warne Lecture at the American Council on Consumer Interests annual conference. What I want to cover in this lecture is what I consider to be one of the most important topics for consumers: financial…

We show that the class of preferences satisfying the gross substitutes condition of [Kelso and Crawford, 1982] is strictly larger than the class of endowed assignment valuations of [Hatfield and Milgrom, 2005], thus resolving the open question…

Observed contracts in the real-world are often very simple, partly reflecting the constraints faced by contracting firms in making the contracts more complex. We focus on one such rigidity, the constraints faced by firms in fine-tuning contracts…

We study the necessity of predictive information in a class of queueing admission control problems, where a system manager is allowed to divert incoming jobs up to a fixed rate, in order to minimize the queueing delay experienced by the admitted…

This Research Spotlight provides a summary of the academic literature on how staggered boards impact shareholder value by insulating management from the pressures of capital markets. It reviews the evidence of:

• Staggered board…

From 1980 to 2000, the rise in the U.S. college-high school graduate wage gap coincided with increased geographic sorting as college graduates concentrated in high wage, high rent cities. This paper estimates a structural spatial equilibrium…

The federal Investment Tax Credit (ITC) for solar installations is scheduled to step-down from 30% to 10% at the beginning of 2017 for corporate investors. This raises the question whether solar PV will be cost competitive post 2016 in the U.S.…

In explaining the sources of cooperation and prosocial behavior, psychologists, behavioral economists, and biologists often focus on factors internal to the individual, such as altruistic motivations, other-regarding preferences, and…

We use a dataset of sell-side analysts’ scenario-based equity valuation estimates to examine whether analysts can assess the state-contingent risk surrounding a firm’s fundamental value. We find that the spread in analysts’ scenario-based…

Providing people with information about the behavior and attitudes of their peers is a strategy commonly employed by those seeking to reduce behavior deemed harmful either to individuals (e.g., high alcohol consumption) or the collective (e…

We examine the link between corporate governance, managerial incentives, and corporate tax avoidance. Similar to other investment opportunities that involve risky expected cash flows, unresolved agency problems may lead managers to engage in more…

Many lament that weak accountability and poor governance impede economic development in Africa. Politicians rely on ethnic allegiances that deliver the vote irrespective of performance, dampening electoral incentives. Giving voters information…

The English Parliament’s struggle for supremacy against monarchical dictatorship during the Civil War (1642-48) was crucial for the establishment of representative government, yet its lessons continue to be debated. I exploit novel data on…