Publications

Equity book-to-market ratios (BTM) should not exceed one if a firm’s return on equity exceeds its cost of capital or it employs conservative accounting. Yet, BTM is above one for many firms, particularly in recession years. We address whether…

A classic question about democratic elections is how much they are able to influence politician behavior by forcing them to anticipate future reelection attempts, especially in contexts where voters are not paying close attention and are not well…

This Research Spotlight provides a summary of the academic literature on whether companies with an independent chairman of the board exhibit better governance quality than companies with a dual chairman/CEO. It reviews the evidence of:

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This Research Spotlight provides a summary of the academic literature on outside (non-executive) directors and directors who are independent according to New York Stock Exchange listing requirements. It reviews the evidence of:

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When the social boundaries between groups are breached, the tendency for people to erect and maintain symbolic boundaries intensifies. Drawing on extant perspectives on boundary maintenance, we distinguish between two strategies that people…

Do mergers help or hinder collusion? This article studies the stability of the vitamin cartels in the 1990s and presents a repeated-games approach to quantify “coordinated effects” of a merger. We use data and direct evidence from American courts…

Objective: Satisfaction with healthcare may be captured by surveys of patients and staff, or in extreme cases, the number and severity of medical disputes. This study tries to investigate the relationship between satisfaction and…

In this article, we examine whether comovement in the stock prices of pairs of Chinese firms connected to the same political network are systematically shaped by the prevailing coordination versus competition incentives of that network’s…

Cooperation is essential for group survival and success. Inequality among group members can undermine voluntary cooperation in groups, and this problem is exacerbated when those with less power observe those with more power behave selfishly. We…

Consistent with the predictions of recent behavioral models of reference- or context-dependent preferences, we find that gasoline demand in the U.S. is up to three times more elastic when prices rise above their average over the previous year…

We develop a simple flexible-price model of business cycles driven by spikes in risk premiums. Aggregate shocks increase firms’ uninsurable idiosyncratic risk and raise risk premiums. We show that risk shocks can create quantitatively plausible…

Environmental, social and governance (ESG) considerations have dominated the discussion of corporate purpose in recent years. We examine commonly accepted notions about ESG that are foundational to the discussion but receive little critical…

Shadow banks service a substantial portion of household debt in the United States, including half of residential mortgages. They also funded and implemented a large portion of the CARES Act-driven debt relief. Despite uniform policy and similar…

Translating the relevance of preclinical models (in vitro, animal models, or organoids) to their relevance in humans presents an important challenge during drug development. The rising abundance of single-cell genomic data from human tumors and…

The property tax is the most under-utilized tax in developing countries. We evaluate the revenue and welfare effects of the main policy instruments used to raise property tax revenue: tax rate changes and enforcement. Using administrative data…

This paper studies the construction of p-values for nonparametric outlier detection, taking a multiple-testing perspective. The goal is to test whether new independent samples belong to the same distribution as a reference data set or are…

Decades of research suggest that information exchange in groups and organizations can reliably improve judgment accuracy in tasks such as financial forecasting, market research, and medical decision making. However, we show that improving the…

The global demand for desalinated water is increasing at a remarkable rate. In a future with increasing demand for water and low-carbon electricity, an interesting ecological dilemma emerges. In a decarbonized world, providing desalinated water…

Product reliability is a key concern for manufacturers. We examine worker turnover as a significant but under recognized determinant of product reliability. Our study collects and integrates (1) data reporting factory worker staffing and turnover…