Publications

Charles Lindblom’s 1959 essay “The Science of ‘Muddling Through’” is best known for the strategy of decision making—disjointed incrementalism—that it recommended. That famous paper and Lindblom’s related work also provided two theories: a…

This paper expands on Brunnermeier, Gorton and Krishnamurthy (2011) and implements a liquidity measure, “Liquidity Mismatch Index (LMI),” to gauge the mismatch between the market liquidity of assets and the funding liquidity of liabilities. We…

We explore the effects of television advertising in the setting of the NFL’s Super Bowl telecast. The Super Bowl is the largest advertising event of the year and is well suited for measurement. The event has the potential to create significant…

Deadly factory fires. Illegal pollution. Injured workers. Many brands have recently been tarnished by publicity of suppliers’ labor and environmental violations. This paper provides guidance to buyers as to how they…

We examine whether acquisitions are more profitable for acquirers when the firms they target disclose higher-quality accounting information. If accounting information reduces uncertainty in the value of the target firm by facilitating a more…

Sales agents are impatient relative to owners. If a good fails to sell, the owner still retains possession of that good and can enjoy its services, whereas the agent receives nothing. As a consequence, sales agents prefer a lower price than does…

An important characteristic of most renewable energy sources is intermittency in their ability to generate electricity. Yet, intermittency is usually ignored in life-cycle cost calculations intended to assess the competitiveness of electric power…

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…

With malls, franchise strips, and big-box retailers increasingly dotting the landscape, many are concerned that U.S. middle-class jobs in manufacturing are being replaced by minimum-wage jobs in retail. Retail jobs have spread, whereas…

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…

This paper studies the effect of performance feedback on tournament outcomes, when a possibly dishonest principal may manipulate the agents’ expectations to stimulate their effort. Under plausible circumstances, an increase in the principal’s…

In the fall of 2014, RR Donnelley, Equilar, and the Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University surveyed 64 asset managers and owners with a combined $17 trillion in assets to understand how institutional investors use the…

This paper studies two disclosure regimes when a firm with superior private information must rely on a strategic certifier to disclose credibly its prospects. In the ex ante (ex post) disclosure regime, the firm must decide on whether to hire the…

A rising share of employees now regularly engage in working from home, but there are concerns this can lead to “shirking from home.” We report the results of a WFH experiment at Ctrip, a 16,000-employee, NASDAQ-listed Chinese travel agency. Call…

This research examines how individuals’ relationship with others sharing the pursuit of the same individual goal may change from the early to later stages of the pursuit. In one qualitative field study, one lab study, and a 7-day field experiment…

This paper examines the economic consequences of institutional investors outsourcing research and voting decisions in public company elections to proxy advisory firms. We investigate the implications of these decisions in the context of…

In an attempt to explain the stability of hierarchy, we focus on the perspective of the powerless and how a subjective sense of dependence leads them to imbue the system and its authorities with legitimacy. In Study 1, we found in a nationally…

Statistical default models, widely used to assess default risk, fail to account for a change in the relations between different variables resulting from an underlying change in agent behavior. We demonstrate this phenomenon using data on…

Institutional investors are highly dissatisfied with the quality of information that they receive about corporate governance policies and practices in the annual proxy. Across the board, they want proxies to be shorter, more concise, more candid…