Publications

We investigate whether the hiring relationships of candidates and political consulting firms better resembles the predictions of the “adversarial” or “allied” models of consultant‐party interaction. We find that the highest‐quality consultants…

Using a unique dataset of scenario-based investment reports, we examine whether the placement of an analyst’s valuation forecast, relative to his/her own subjective assessment of the distribution of scenario-based valuations for the covered firm…

Economic sociologists agree that economic rationality is constructed and that morality and economic interests often intersect. Yet we know little about how Americans organize their economic beliefs or assess the morality of markets. We…

Trust dilemmas arise whenever individuals perceive opportunities to benefit from engaging in trusting behavior with others, yet recognize that doing so entails the risk of exploitation. My research examines the determinants of judgment and choice…

The past decade has witnessed an explosion of interest in the partisan polarization of the American electorate. Scholarly investigation of this topic has coincided with the media’s portrayal of a polity deeply divided along partisan lines. Yet…

Federal regulations define adverse drug events as those “associated with the use of a drug in humans whether or not considered drug related”. Health care professionals and consumers can voluntarily report adverse drug events directly to the US…

In a noisy rational expectations framework with costly information, some agents expend resources to become informed, and earn a return for their efforts by trading with the uninformed. Applying this insight, we examine the proposition that an…

Governments may extract rent from private citizens by inflating taxes and spending on projects which benefit special interests. Using a spatial equilibrium model, I show that less elastic housing supplies increase governments’ abilities to…

We present a theory of dynamic coalitions for a legislative bargaining game in which policies continue in effect in the absence of new legislation. We characterize Markov perfect equilibria with dynamic coalitions, which are decisive sets of…

Why do we like the music we do? Research has shown that musical preferences and personality are linked, yet little is known about other influences on preferences such as cognitive styles. To address this gap, we investigated how individual…

We examine the economic determinants of short-sale supply, and its consequences for future stock returns.  Lendable supply increases with expected borrowing costs and decreases with financial statement constructs that indicate overvaluation…

The regression discontinuity (RD) design is popular because it provides a design-based estimate of the incumbency advantage. However, the RD estimate is “local”: it only identifies the effect in hypothetical elections with a 50-50 tie between the…

Under revision for Econometrica

This paper studies U.S. banks’ exposure to interest rate and credit risk. We exploit the factor structure in interest rates to represent many bank positions in terms of simple factor portfolios.…

Nowadays, millions of people around the world use social networking sites to express everyday thoughts and feelings. Many researchers have tried to make use of social media to study users’ online behaviors and psychological states. However,…

We study a setting of non-atomic routing in a network of m parallel links with asymmetry of information. While a central entity (such as a GPS navigation system) — a mediator hereafter — knows the…

The current paper connects anxiety about disease contamination to that about cultural contamination and the exclusionary behavior toward ethnic outgroups that it incites. We suggest that when individuals are exposed to disease fears, an epistemic…

We examine a life-cycle cost concept that applies to both manufacturing and service industries in which upfront capacity investments are essential. Borrowing from the energy literature, we refer to this cost measure as the Levelized Product Cost…