Publications

What explains short‐term fluctuations of stock prices? This paper exploits a natural experiment from the 18 century in which information flows were regularly interrupted for exogenous reasons. English shares were traded on the Amsterdam exchange…

This paper analyzes a framework in which countries over time pollute and invest in green technologies. Without a climate treaty, the countries pollute too much and invest too little, particularly if intellectual property rights are weak.…

This paper examines the effect of market participants’ information processing costs on firms’ disclosure choice. Using the recent extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) regulation as an exogenous shock to these information processing costs…

We examine the pricing of financial crash insurance during the 2007-2009 financial crisis in U.S. option markets. A large amount of aggregate tail risk is missing from the price of financial sector crash insurance during the financial crisis. The…

We examine graduate student teaching as an input to two production processes: the education of undergraduates and the development of graduate students themselves. Using fluctuations in full-time faculty availability as an instrument, we find…

I discuss the motivations and actions (or inaction) of individuals in the financial system, governments, central banks, academia and the media that collectively contribute to the persistence of a dangerous and distorted financial system and…

Previous experiments have shown that college students benefit when they understand that challenges in the transition to college are common and improvable and, thus, that early struggles need not portend a permanent lack of belonging or potential…

Social movement researchers argue that tactical innovation occurs as a response to changes external to movements, such as police repression and shifts in political authority, or is due to internal movement processes, such as the characteristics…

Using a large social media dataset and open-vocabulary methods from computational linguistics, we explored differences in language use across gender, affiliation, and assertiveness. In Study 1, we analyzed topics (groups of semantically similar…

This paper quantitatively assesses time inconsistency, moral hazard, and political ideology in monopoly regulation of electricity distribution. We specify and estimate a dynamic model of utility regulation featuring investment and moral hazard.…

The authors study an international law firm that changed its compensation plan for team leaders to address a multitasking problem: Team leaders were focusing their effort on billable hours and not spending sufficient time on leadership activities…

Since the end of World War II, there have been 259 armed conflicts in 159 locations. Sierra Leone’s civil war began 25 years ago, at a time when roughly 25% of all countries worldwide were experiencing civil war.…

Since its rapid rise in early 2009, scholars have advanced a variety of explanations for popular support for the Tea Party movement. Here we argue that various political, economic, and demographic trends and events – e.g., the election of the…

A signature story is an intriguing, authentic, involving narrative with a strategic message that enables a firm to grow by clarifying or enhancing its brand, customer relationships, organization, and/or the business strategy. Signature stories…

We study a principal-agent setting in which both sides learn about future profitability from output, and the project can be abandoned/terminated if profitability is too low. With learning, shirking by the agent both reduces output and lowers the…

Newly public companies tend to exhibit abnormally high accruals in the year of their initial public offering (IPO). Although the prevailing view in the literature is that these accruals are caused by opportunistic misreporting, we show that these…

We examine methods used to survey firms on their management and organizational practices. We contrast the strengths and weaknesses of “open ended questions” (like the World Management Survey) with “closed questions” (like the MOPS). For this type…

We test for the existence of housing bubbles associated with a failure of the transversality condition that requires the present value of payments occurring infinitely far in the future to be zero. The most prominent such bubble is the classic…

According to Terror Management Theory, people respond to reminders of mortality by seeking psychological security and bolstering their self-esteem. Because previous research suggests that having power can provide individuals a sense of security…

The present research re-examines one of the most basic assertions regarding the evaluation of hedonic experiences: the end effect. The end effect suggests that the retrospective evaluation of an experience is disproportionately influenced by the…