Publications

Most legislatures require the consent of only a simple majority to pass a proposal, so why donʼt legislative outcomes favor only a bare majority? We show that compromise can be achieved if legislators are neither too impatient nor too patient,…

Consumers often need to search for product information before making purchase decisions. We consider a tractable (continuous-time) model of gradual learning, in which consumers incur search costs to learn further product information, and update…

The experiences of the largest corporation in the world and those of a start-up company show how companies can profitably reduce greenhouse gas emissions in their supply chains. The operations management literature suggests additional…

Recently, shareholder groups have sued companies for inadequate disclosure in the annual proxy. They allege that companies provide insufficient disclosure to determine how to vote on “say on pay.” If a company follows SEC guidelines, why is this…

Understanding the mechanisms by which political advertising affects voters is crucial for evaluating the welfare effects of campaign finance and election regulation. This paper develops a method to distinguish between two alternative mechanisms…

New research finds a serious gap between executives’ knowledge about social media and its use at their companies.

Less than a third of companies today use social media to support their corporate strategy and risk management practices,…

Intuition suggests that firms with higher cash holdings should be “safer” and have lower credit spreads. Yet empirically, the correlation between cash and spreads is robustly positive. This puzzling finding can be explained by the precautionary…

The paper presents a dynamic game where players contribute to a public bad, invest in technologies, and write incomplete contracts. Despite the n + 1 stocks in the model, the analysis is tractable and the symmetric Markov perfect equilibrium…

We study optimal compensation in a dynamic framework where the CEO consumes in multiple periods, can undo the contract by privately saving, and can temporarily inflate earnings. We obtain a simple closed-form contract that yields clear…

We study the sources of match-specific value at large American law firms by analyzing how graduates of law schools group into law firms. We measure the degree to which lawyers from certain schools concentrate within firms and then analyze how…

The responsibility of corporate monitors is to safeguard assets and reduce agency costs. Should monitors be paid bonuses? If so, what form should they take and what performance targets should be used?

Our paper examines whether the failure of unsophisticated investors to rebalance their portfolios can help to explain the countercyclical volatility of aggregate risk compensation in financial markets. To answer this question, we set up a model…

Consumers frequently engage in sequential decisions. This article explores whether the order of these decisions can influence the manner in which consumers search through the possible choice options. Results from five studies suggest that…

Five studies examined whether the practice of regifting—a social taboo—is as offensive to the original givers as potential

regifters assume. Participants who imagined regifting a gift (receivers) thought that the original giver would be…

When people seek to impress others, they often do so by highlighting individual achievements. Despite the intuitive appeal of this strategy, we demonstrate that people often prefer potential rather than achievement when evaluating others. Indeed…

Can subtle wording changes in marketing communications, such as saying “you and [the brand]” as opposed to “we”, affect people’s evaluations of real-world brands? Despite their importance in interpersonal communication, the effects of such…

General intelligence (g) and virtually all other behavioral traits are heritable. Associations between g and specific single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in several candidate genes involved in brain function have been reported. We sought to…

Amy Finkelstein is the 2012 recipient of the John Bates Clark Medal from the American Economic Association. The core concerns of Amy’s research program have been insurance markets and health care. She has addressed whether asymmetric information…

When Japanese short-term bond yields were near their zero bound, yields on long-term bonds showed substantial fluctuation, and there was a strong positive relationship between the level of interest rates and yield volatilities/risk premiums…