Publications

Today’s multinational companies are held to myriad social, environmental, and ethical standards in their supply chains. But despite efforts at monitoring, buyers routinely face challenges when working with suppliers to meet and exceed standards.…

Studies of organizational culture are almost always based on two assumptions: (a) Senior leaders are the prime determinant of the culture, and (b) culture is related to consequential organizational outcomes. Although intuitively reasonable and…

The expected value of the log of a Bayesian’s posterior assessment of the true state of nature, computed under the probability law of the true state, is always at least as large as the log of the prior.

We decompose the market-to-book ratio into two additive components: a conservatism correction factor and a future-to-book ratio. The conservatism correction factor exceeds the benchmark value of one whenever the accounting for past transactions…

This paper analyzes the economic incidence of sustained changes in federal government spending at the local level. We use a new identification strategy to isolate geographical variation in formula-based federal spending and develop three sets of…

Many empirical studies use Fuzzy Regression Discontinuity (FRD) designs to identify treatment effects when the receipt of treatment is potentially correlated to outcomes. Existing FRD methods identify the local average treatment effect (LATE) on…

Although the Supreme Court is a counter-majoritarian institution by design, many scholars have contended that without concrete powers, the Court relies on public support for legitimacy. Accordingly, it is important to understand the relationship…

In 2009, the SEC mandated that financial statements be filed using extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL). The SEC contends that this new search-facilitating technology will reduce informational barriers that separate smaller, less-…

A novel approach to evaluating the impact of nonprofit organizations is proposed, combining social network and linguistic analysis. The authors examined data from nonprofit organizations’ websites and site hyperlinks to other organizations…

Corporate governance experts pay considerable attention to the composition of the full board of directors. And yet, much of the substantive work of the board is carried out by committee.

While the nominating and governance committee, in…

We measure the repo funding extended by money market funds (MMF) and securities lenders to the shadow banking system, including quantities, haircuts, and repo rates by type of underlying collateral. We find that repo played only a small role in…

A growing portion of offline and online human activities leave digital footprints in electronic databases. Resulting big social data offers unprecedented insights into population-wide patterns and detailed characteristics of the individuals. The…

Social scientists have traditionally argued that whiteness—the attribute of being recognized and treated as a White person in society—is powerful because it is invisible. On this view, members of the racially dominant group have the unique…

The policy choices of governments are frequently durable. From the building of bridges to the creation of social programs, investments in public infrastructure typically last well beyond a single electoral cycle. In this paper we…

We analyze a policy proposal for regulating the next generation of baseload electricity generation facilities in the United States. The cornerstone of this regulation is a (hypothetical) EPA mandate for an emission standard of 80 kg of CO2 per…

The quality and quantity of data on economic activity are expanding rapidly. Empirical research increasingly relies on newly available large-scale administrative data or private sector data that often is obtained through collaboration with…

Motivated by polar extremes of monopartisanship and nonpartisanship in existing literature on parties in legislatures, we introduce and analyze a more moderate theory of competitive partisan lawmaking. The distinguishing feature of competitive…

The downside risk capital asset pricing model (DR-CAPM) can price the cross section of currency returns. The market-beta differential between high and low interest rate currencies is higher conditional on bad market returns, when the market price…

The shareholders of public corporations have considerable interest in the choice of individual to serve as CEO of their company. They want to be assured that the company has a viable plan in place to replace the current CEO if necessary.

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Previous research has typically treated collection as a top-down process and focused on its later stages. However, collections may start by accident and are often triggered by incidental, bottom-up factors. The authors propose that a small number…