Publications

The garbage can account of organizations where problems, solutions, and people chase each other is often invoked but rarely studied since its publication 44 years ago. It has been critiqued for being a metaphor rather than a model, and offering a…

This paper studies multitier supply chain networks in the presence of disruption risk. Firms decide how much to source from their upstream suppliers so as to maximize their expected profits, and prices of intermediate goods are set so that…

Eliminating firms’ access to tax havens can have unintended consequences for their domestic economic activity. We study a policy that limited profit shifting by U.S. multinationals and show it raised the tax cost of domestic investment. Firms…

This paper studies families’ preferences for peers in the school and the implications of those preferences for the distribution of academic outcomes. I develop an equilibrium model of school competition and student sorting under social…

We derive analytical relationships between shock responses and theory‐implied causal effects (comparative statics) in dynamic settings with linear profits and linear‐quadratic stock accumulation costs. For permanent profitability shocks,…

We examine the association between thousands of state and local firm-specific tax subsidies and business activity in the surrounding county, measured as the number of employees, aggregate wages, per capita employment, per capita wages, and number…

In October 2019, the Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University conducted a nationwide survey of 3,062 individuals — representative by age, race, political affiliation, household income, and state residence — to understand the…

It is widely understood that scarcity focuses people on “here and now” problems, causing myopic, impulsive decisions. Our work challenges this basic premise and asks whether scarcity can ever lead to increased patience. We suggest that existing…

This paper develops a new approach to isolate and quantify the extent to which deposit withdrawals are due to liquidity, exposure to policy risk, or expectations about how other depositors will behave. We use high frequency micro-data on insured…

Consider a monopolistic vendor who faces a known demand curve. By setting a price that equates marginal revenue with marginal cost, the vendor will maximize his profit. This logic holds true of both physical and digital goods. But since…

We examine whether financial reporting quality influences employee turnover and wages using employer-employee matched data in the U.S. We find that low financial reporting quality is associated with high employee turnover risk, so workers demand…

We study the causes of “nutritional inequality”: why the wealthy eat more healthfully than the poor in the United States. Exploiting supermarket entry and household moves to healthier neighborhoods, we reject that neighborhood environments…

Why do rational politicians choose inefficient policy instruments? Environmental regulation, for example, often takes the form of technology standards and quotas even when cost-effective Pigou taxes are available. To shed light on this puzzle, we…

We show that kidney exchange markets suffer from market failures whose remedy could increase transplants by 30 to 63 percent. First, we document that the market is fragmented and inefficient; most transplants are arranged by hospitals instead of…

Both individuals and organizations can (and do) engage in unethical behaviors. Across six experiments, we examine how people’s ethical judgments are affected by whether the agent engaging in unethical action is a person or an organization. People…

Among the controversies in corporate governance, perhaps none is more heated or widely debated across society than that of CEO pay. The views that American citizens have on CEO pay is centrally important because public opinion influences…

New research from the Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University and the Diligent Institute finds that corporate directors are not as shareholder-centric as commonly believed and that companies do not put the needs of…

Forty-five years ago, power as a topic was mostly absent from management textbooks and courses, including executive education teaching, in the fields of business and public administration. This was the case notwithstanding the…

A common challenge in estimating the long-term impacts of treatments (e.g., job training programs) is that the outcomes of interest (e.g., lifetime earnings) are observed with a long delay. We address this problem by combining several short-term…

We examine how U.S. individuals respond to regulation intended to reduce offshore tax evasion. The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) requires foreign financial institutions to report information to the U.S. government regarding U.S.…