Publications

Variation in the use of hospital and physician services among Medicare beneficiaries is well documented. However, less is known about the younger, commercially insured population. Using data from the Community Tracking Study to investigate this…

In many science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines, women are outperformed by men in test scores, jeopardizing their success in science-oriented courses and careers. The current study tested the effectiveness of a psychological…

Without visual attention, even the obvious–like a gorilla walking through a scene of people–goes undetected (Mack & Rock, 1998; Simons & Chabris, 1999). This “inattentional blindness” is a persistent, well-documented limitation of the…

• Winner, 2011 Smith Breeden Prize, First Prize Paper for the best capital markets paper published in the Journal of Finance. State breakdown of $2.5 trillion unfunded public pension liability at the state level.

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We propose that organization members overestimate the degree to which others share their views on ethical matters. Further, we argue that being a broker in an advice network exacerbates this false consensus bias. That is, a high level of “…

With the best of intentions, companies experiment with isolated efforts to improve sustainability — only to encounter a long string of unanticipated consequences, often in the form of financial, social, or environmental costs. That’s partly…

This paper studies voting in corporate director elections. We construct a comprehensive data set of 2,058,788 mutual fund votes over a two-year period. We find systematic heterogeneity in voting: some funds are consistently more management-…

A significant need exists for new medical technologies that have the potential to expand access to important diagnostics, treatments, and specialty services by reducing costs without sacrificing quality. These technologies have a high social…

In any canonical Gaussian dynamic term structure model (GDTSM), the conditional forecasts of the pricing factors are invariant to the imposition of no-arbitrage restrictions. This invariance is maintained even in the presence of a variety…

Some executives who accumulate a substantial ownership position in the company hedge or pledge their shares to limit their financial risk. Should the board of directors allow this to occur?

Can negative information about a product increase sales, and if so, when? Although popular wisdom suggests that “any publicity is good publicity,” prior research has demonstrated only downsides to negative press. Negative reviews or word of mouth…

Permit markets are celebrated as a policy instrument since they allow (i) firms to equalize marginal costs through trade and (ii) the regulator to distribute the burden in a politically desirable way. These two concerns, however, may conflict in…

Invited commentary on Carolyn Tarrant et al.’s “Continuity and trust in primary care: A qualitative study informed by game theory.”

Bilateral investment treaties (BITs) are agreements between two countries for the reciprocal encouragement, promotion and protection of investments in each other’s territories by companies based in either country. Germany and Pakistan signed the…

We superimpose a radiation fallout model onto a traffic flow model to assess the evacuation versus shelter-in-place decisions after the daytime ground-level detonation of a 10-kt improvised nuclear device in Washington, DC. In our model, ≈80k…

Traditional real options models demonstrate the importance of the “option to wait” due to uncertainty over future shocks to project cash flows. However, there is often another important source of uncertainty: uncertainty over the permanence…

We describe recent advances in the empirical analysis of insurance markets. This new research proposes ways to estimate individual demand for insurance and the relationship between prices and insurer costs in the presence of adverse and…

Local governments can provide services with their own employees or by contracting with private or public sector providers. We develop a model of this ‘make-or-buy’ choice that highlights the trade-off between productive efficiency and the costs…

We analyze investment incentives and market structure under oligopoly competition in industries with congestion effects. Our results are particularly focused on models inspired by modern technology-based services such as telecommunications and…