Publications

Conventional wisdom and past research suggest that contradicting oneself, or changing one’s stated opinion, should undermine one’s persuasiveness. In contrast to this view, we propose that under specifiable conditions contradicting oneself might…

d.light design is a for-profit social enterprise whose purpose is to create new freedoms for customers without access to reliable power so they can enjoy a brighter future. The company designs, manufactures, and distributes solar light and power…

In the United States and other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, the expected returns on stocks, adjusted for volatility, are much higher in recessions than in expansions. We consider feasible trading…

This study explores the effect of cross-sectional and time-series differences in financial reporting attributes on the predictive ability of financial ratios for bankruptcy. We identify proxies for discretion over financial reporting, the…

We develop an analytically tractable model integrating dynamic investment theory with dynamic optimal incentive contracting, thereby endogenizing financing constraints. Incentive contracting generates a history-dependent wedge between…

Premiums in health insurance markets frequently do not reflect individual differences in costs, either because consumers have private information or because prices are not risk rated. This creates inefficiencies when consumers self-select…

To ensure that individual actors take certain actions, community enforcement may be required. This can present a rules-versus-discretion dilemma: It can become impossible to employ discretion based on information that is not widely held, because…

Disruptive innovations are like missiles launched at your business. For 20 years we’ve described missile after missile that took aim and annihilated its target: Napster, Amazon, and the Apple Store devastated Tower Records and Musicland; tiny,…

There is overwhelming anecdotal and empirical evidence for individual differences in musical preferences. However, little is known about what drives those preferences. Are people drawn to particular musical genres (e.g., rap, jazz) or to certain…

Union pension funds are active in the proxy process, sponsoring approximately one-third of shareholder proposals each year. How do union pension funds determine which positions to advocate and which companies to target? Are their proposals made…

We study a model in which managers’ disclosure and investment decisions are both endogenous and managers can manipulate their voluntary reports through (suboptimal) investment, financing, or operating decisions. Managers are privately informed…

Competition for seats in elite U.S. graduate school programs has intensified

dramatically over the past 40 years. In this paper, we study the market for

young attorneys to illuminate the role that elite graduate programs play in…

Free spaces are arenas insulated from the control of elites in organizations and societies. A basic question is whether they incubate challenges to authority. We suggest that free spaces foster collective empowerment when they assemble large…

Presidential elections provide both an important context in which to study advertising and a setting that mitigates the challenges of dynamics and endogeneity. We use the 2000 and 2004 general elections to analyze the effect of market-level…

We present a model for the equilibrium movement of capital between asset markets that are distinguished only by the levels of capital invested in each. Investment in that market with the greatest amount of capital earns the lowest risk premium.…

We propose that category membership can operate as a collective market signal for quality when low-quality producers face higher costs of gaining membership. The strength of membership as a collective signal increases with the distinctiveness, or…

We review the last two decades of research in dynamic corporate finance, focusing on capital structure and the financing of investment. We first cover continuous time contingent claims models, starting with real options models, and working…

This paper studies information aggregation in dynamic markets with partially informed strategic traders. A natural condition on traded securities and information structure, “separability,” is introduced. If a security is separable, information…

For millions of people across Africa, health interventions such as vaccines, HIV counseling and treatment, and other public health expertise are out of reach. Barriers to health care can include shortage of health personnel, scarcity of medicines…

Americans tend to admire powerful leaders. However, it is not clear the extent to which having a powerful CEO is beneficial to an organization. How much power is too much power?