Publications

We use trade-level data to examine the role of mutual funds (MFs) in earnings news dissemination. MFs trade (172%) more on earnings announcement (EA) days than on non-EA days. The EA trades made by MFs are reliably more profitable than their non-…

We characterize the price-transparency role of benchmarks in over-the-counter markets. A benchmark can, under conditions, raise social surplus by increasing the volume of beneficial trade, facilitating more efficient matching between dealers…

Board members rely on information provided by management to inform their decisions. Unfortunately, some research calls into question the adequacy of the information the board members receive and, by extension, the quality of decisions they are…

This article provides a flexible model of resource extraction, such as deforestation, and derives the optimal conservation contract. When property rights are “strong” and districts are in charge of extracting their own resources to get revenues,…

I model the equilibrium risk sharing between countries with varying financial development. The most financially developed country takes greater risks because its financial intermediaries deal with funding problems better. In good times, the more…

We find that shocks to the equity capital ratio of financial intermediaries — Primary Dealer counterparties of the New York Federal Reserve — possess significant explanatory power for cross-sectional variation in expected…

As more and more instances of corporate hypocrisy become public, consumers have developed an inherent general skepticism towards firms’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) claims. As CSR skepticism bears heavily on consumers’ attitudes and…

Public regulation is increasingly facing competition from “private politics” in the form of activism and corporate self-regulation. However, its effectiveness, welfare consequences, and interaction with public regulation are poorly understood.…

We posit a female advantage in the relationship between self-reliance and leadership evaluations. We test this prediction in four studies. First, using multi-rater evaluations of young managers, we find that self-reliance relates positively to…

We estimate the causal effect of sovereign default on the equity returns of Argentine firms. We identify this effect by exploiting changes in the probability of Argentine sovereign default induced by legal rulings in the case of Republic of…

Using an original dataset of fully monetized LBOs initiated from 1990 to 2006, we examine the emergence of an entrepreneurial transaction strategy focused on revenue growth and its incidence relative to more “classic” strategies focused on…

The International Integrated Reporting Council’s Framework identifies two goals for integrated reporting: improved information for outside providers of financial capital and better internal decision making. We extend prior research that finds a…

This research explores how the experience of a jilt—the anticipation and subsequent inaccessibility of a highly desirable, aspirant option—influences preference for incumbent and non-incumbent options. We conceptualize jilting as a multi-stage…

Accepted at American Economic Review

Fixing the investment horizon, the returns to currency carry trades decrease as the maturity of the foreign bonds increases, because the local currency term premia offset the currency risk…

People spend considerable effort managing the impressions they give others. Social psychologists have shown that people manage these impressions differently depending upon their personality. Facebook and other social media provide a new forum for…

Word embeddings are a powerful approach for analyzing language, and exponential family embeddings (EFE) extend them to other types of data. Here we develop structured exponential family embeddings (S-EFE), a method for discovering embeddings that…

I examine the conditions under which trade can support peaceful coexistence and prosperity when particular ethnic groups are cheap targets of violence. A simple theoretical framework reveals that for a broad set of cases, while inter-ethnic…

Commercial radio spectrum use rights in the US are traditionally assigned using licenses over large geographic areas with 10- or 15-year terms, to encourage infrastructure investment. However, such long-term licenses are difficult to reassign as…

We evaluate the effects of three ECB policies (the Securities Markets Programme, the Outright Monetary Transactions, and the Long-Term Refinancing Operations) on government bond yields.  We use a novel Kalman-filter augmented event-study…

Classic arguments for decentralization, augmented by ideas about how participation empowers the poor, motivate the widely used approach in foreign aid called community-driven development.  CDD devolves control over the selection,…