We empower faculty to design and discover original research that challenges conventions and creates breakthroughs that push boundaries of knowledge.
Publication Types
Journal Articles
Books
Working Papers
Case Studies
Browse Publications
Bayesianism and Wishful Thinking Are Compatible
Bayesian principles show up across many domains of human cognition, but wishful thinking — where beliefs are updated in the direction of desired outcomes rather than what the evidence implies — seems to threaten the universality of Bayesian…
Behavioral Responses to State Income Taxation of High Earners: Evidence from California
Using administrative data, we analyze the response to Proposition 30, a 2012 measure that increased California marginal tax rates by up to 3 percentage points for high-income households. Relative to baseline departure rates, an additional 0.8…
Beyond the Balance Sheet Model of Banking: Implications for Bank Regulation and Monetary Policy
We empirically document two adjustment margins that are usually absent from the predominant “bank balance sheet lending” view of financial intermediation. For the shadow bank substitution margin, shadow banks substitute for traditional banks…
Carbon Accounting Quality: Measurement and the Role of Assurance
We examine the role of assurance — third-party verification — on carbon accounting quality. We develop a measure of carbon accounting quality based on the deviation of reported emissions from a model-based expected level and use two other survey-…
Changes in Social Norms during the Early Stages of the COVID-19 Pandemic across 43 Countries
The emergence of COVID-19 dramatically changed social behavior across societies and contexts. Here we study whether social norms also changed. Specifically, we study this question for cultural tightness (the degree to which societies generally…
Cultural Tariffing: Appropriation and the Right to Cross Cultural Boundaries
Why are some acts of cultural boundary-crossing considered permissible whereas others are repudiated as cultural appropriation? We argue that perceptions of cultural appropriation formed in response to the emergence of cultural omnivorousness as…
Earnings News and Local Household Spending
Using debit and credit card data, we find a one standard-deviation increase in firms’ earnings surprise is linked to a 3% or $5.6 billion increase in aggregate quarterly consumption of local households near the disclosing firms’ headquarters. The…
Earnings Targets, Strategic Patent Sales, and Patent Trolls
Innovative public firms sell 9.6% (615) more patents in the last month, relative to the first half of the fiscal year. Consistent with reporting incentives driving these sales, they are more pronounced among firms with strong incentives to meet…
Explaining the Evolution of Gossip
Gossip, the exchange of personal information about absent third parties, is ubiquitous in human societies. However, the evolution of gossip remains a puzzle. The current article proposes an evolutionary cycle of gossip and uses an agent-based…
Fee Variation in Private Equity
We study how investment fees vary within private equity funds. Net-of-fee return clustering suggests that most funds have two tiers of fees, and we decompose differences across tiers into both management- and performance-based fees. Managers of…
Online Images Amplify Gender Bias
Each year, people spend less time reading and more time viewing images, which are proliferating online. Images from platforms such as Google and Wikipedia are downloaded by millions every day, and millions more are interacting through social…
Pricing Power in Advertising Markets: Theory and Evidence
Existing theories of media competition imply that advertisers will pay a lower price in equilibrium to reach consumers who multi-home across competing outlets. We generalize and extend this theoretical result and test it using data from…
Regulating Privacy Online: An Economic Evaluation of the GDPR
Modern websites rely on personal data to measure and improve their performance and to market to consumers. The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) limited access to such personal data, with the goal of protecting consumer…
The Secular Decline of Bank Balance Sheet Lending
The traditional model of bank-led financial intermediation, where banks issue demandable deposits to savers and make informationally sensitive loans to borrowers, has seen a dramatic decline since 1970s. Instead, private credit is increasingly…
Using Price Promotions to Drive Children’s Healthy Choices in a Developing Economy
We examine how price discounts — a classic marketing incentive — drive children’s healthy choices in the understudied context of a developing economy. We partnered with UNICEF to launch three field experiments in Panamá among 2,418 children to…
When Rule Breaking in Art Falls Flat: Cultural Tightness Deflates Deviant Artists’ Impact
Previous research in western countries shows that artists whose work deviates from their own previous style (intrapersonal deviance) and other artists’ styles (interpersonal deviance) gain greater impact than nondeviant artists (Stamkou et al…
The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder
The definitive guide to eliminating the forces that make it harder, more complicated, or downright impossible to get things done in organizations. Find out why Adam Grant says “If every leader took the ideas in this book seriously, the world…
A Multifaceted Intervention to Improve Teamwork on an Inpatient Pediatric Neurosurgery Service
Background
Increased safety reports related to interprofessional teamwork on an acute care unit at a quaternary children…
Qualitative Interview Study of Strategies To Support Healthcare Personnel Mental Health Through an Occupational Health Lens
Employee Occupational Health (‘occupational health’) clinicians have expansive perspectives of the experience of healthcare personnel. Integrating mental health into the purview of occupational health is a newer approach that could combat…
Assessing Health Care Leadership and Management for Resilience and Performance During Crisis: The HERO-36
Background
Whereas organizational literature has provided much insight into the conceptual and theoretical underpinnings of organizational leadership and management during emergencies, measures to operationalize related effective…