Publications

Application of the Coase Theorem to marital bargaining suggests that shifting from a consent divorce regime to no-fault unilateral divorce laws should not affect divorce rates. Each iteration of the empirical literature examining the evolution of…

Analyzing 50 years of inflation expectations data from several sources, we document substantial disagreement among both consumers and professional economists about expected future inflation. Moreover, this disagreement shows substantial variation…

Huddart and Lang (J. Accounting Econom. 34 (2003)) documents that higher level of employee option exercise during a particular month is associated with lower returns in subsequent months, suggesting employees exploit private information in their…

This research note uses a median legislator model to assess the claim that racial redistricting leads to conservative policy outcomes. I examine policy preferences of southern representatives to the U.S. House in the late 1980s and early 1990s.…

Contrary to the predictions of standard economic theory, capital market liberalization has been a mixed blessing for many countries. Liberalization of debt inflows exposes economies to the risk of crises stemming from sudden changes in investor…

Social science theories can become self-fulfilling because they shape institutional designs and management practices as well as social norms and expectations about behavior, thereby creating the behavior they predict. Social theories also…

In a choice between any two options, decision makers can be divided into three segments: those who strongly prefer the first option, those who strongly prefer the second option, and those who might choose either option depending on the particular…

It has been argued that seemingly benevolent and complementary gender stereotypes serve to maintain or increase support for the system of gender inequality, especially among women. In prior work, support for this hypothesis has been indirectly…

Multidivisional firms frequently rely on external market prices in order to value internal transactions across profit centers. This paper examines market-based transfer pricing when an upstream division has monopoly power in selling a proprietary…

Public opinion research shows that most people espouse egalitarian ideals and acknowledge substantial income inequality in society, but they consistently perceive the economic system to be highly fair and legitimate. In an attempt to better…

Although there are many varieties of feminist theory, they share two objectives. The first is descriptive: to reveal obvious and subtle gender inequalities. The second is change-oriented: to reduce or eradicate those inequalities. Feminist…

This paper extends transaction costs economics to analyze relationships between firms and regulatory agencies. It compares the economic efficiency of firm-agency governance structures for dealing with pollution reduction. The transaction costs of…

This study investigates factors associated with firms decisions in 2002 and early 2003 to recognize stock-based compensation expense under Statement of Financial Accounting Standards (SFAS) No. 123. We find that the likelihood of SFAS 123 expense…

Three experiments investigated the hypothesis that power increases an action orientation in the power holder, even in contexts where power is not directly experienced. In Experiment 1, participants who possessed structural power in a group task…

We show that hedonic price indexes may be biased when not all product characteristics are observed. We derive two primary sources of bias. The first is a classical selection problem that arises due to changes over time in the values of unobserved…

Debt relief is unlikely to stimulate investment and growth in the worlds highly indebted poor countries (HIPCs). This is because the HIPCs do not suffer from debt overhang. The principal obstacle to investment and growth in the worlds poorest…

Supply chain security has become a major concern to the private and public sector, after the disastrous event of September 11, 2001. Prior to September 11, 2001, supply chain security concerns were related to controlling theft and reducing…

This paper uses daily fund flow data to examine the extent of late trading in the mutual fund industry. Using data from a 10-15 percent subsample of the industry, I find annual long-term shareholder losses due to late trading of about 5 basis…

This paper analyzes the determinants of the cross-national adoption of the international Environmental Management System standard ISO 14001 using a panel of 102 countries from 1996 to 2000. I use new institutional economics to develop hypotheses…