Publications

We examine whether and how firms structure their merger and acquisition (M&A) deals to avoid scrutiny from antitrust regulators. There are approximately 40% more M&As than expected bunching just below thresholds that trigger antitrust…

This seems an opportune time to reflect on our paper, The Iron Cage Revisited, some 40 years after its original publication. In this essay, we recall the influences on us at the time, speculate on factors that shaped its subsequent…

We study price and non-price provisions of debt contracts to gauge how creditors evaluate changes in senior executives’ personal income taxes (“managerial taxes”) of their borrowers. Because managers’ personal income taxes can exacerbate…

Purchase decisions typically involve tradeoffs between attributes associated with desirability (e.g., quality) and feasibility (e.g., price). In this paper we examine how the decision context impacts consumers’ preference between a high-…

We examine how firms’ contractual relationships with their employees affect the design of their debt contracts, and the use of financial covenants in particular. Viewing the firm as the nexus of both explicit and implicit contractual…

A higher U.S. government debt/output ratio does not forecast higher surpluses or lower returns on Treasurys in the future. Neither future cash flows nor discount rates account for the variation in the current debt/output ratio. The market…

Recent years have seen a growing sociological interest in meaning. In fact, some argue that sociology cannot confront its foundational questions without addressing meaning. Yet sociologists mean many things when they talk about meaning. We…

China’s financial system has been integral to its spectacular economic growth over the past 40 years. We review the recent literature on China’s financial system and its connections to the Chinese economy based on the categories of Aggregate…

Choice screen auctions have been recently deployed in 31 European countries, allowing consumers to choose their preferred search engine on Google’s Android platform instead of automatically defaulting them to Google’s own search engine. I show…

We examine whether financial reporting quality affects worker wages using employer-employee matched data in the U.S. We find that low financial reporting quality is associated with a compensating wage differential — i.e., a risk premium — even…

Turmeric adulterated with lead chromate pigment has been previously identified as a primary source of lead exposure in Bangladesh. This study assesses the impact of a multi-faceted intervention between 2017 and 2021 to reduce lead-tainted…

Although many contemporary organizations face institutional pressures to embrace open organizing principles, some defer or decline the call. We examine how existing bureaucratic practices shape organizations’ initial steps towards openness to…

Mastering the art of spontaneous speaking is important for leaders. They must do more than just deliver a good prepared keynote — they need to nail the Q&A and small talk afterward, or crush off-the-cuff toasts and speeches. The author…

Although information design has recently received significant attention as a tool for shaping consumers’ purchase behavior, little is known about its use and implications in two-sided marketplaces, where both supply and demand consist of self-…

We study how discounting and monitoring jointly determine whether cooperation is possible in repeated games with imperfect (public or private) monitoring. Our main result provides a simple bound on the strength of players’ incentives as a…

This study examines the standardization of venture capital (VC) contracts since the release of the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) model charter in 2003. Using nearly 5,000 charters issued in connection with a startup’s Series A…

Two-sided platforms play an important role in reducing frictions and facilitating trade, and in doing so they increasingly engage in collecting and processing data about supply and demand. This paper establishes that platforms have an incentive…

Digital goods can generate large benefits for consumers, but these benefits are largely unmeasured in the national accounts, including GDP and productivity. In this paper, we measure welfare gains from 10 popular digital goods across 13 countries…