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Personality, Gender, and Age in the Language of Social Media: The Open-Vocabulary Approach
We analyzed 700 million words, phrases, and topic instances collected from the Facebook messages of 75,000 volunteers, who also took standard personality tests, and found striking variations in language with personality, gender, and age. In our…
The Ins and Outs of Large Scale Asset Purchases
Large scale asset purchases (“LSAPs,” also often referred to as quantitative easing or “QE”) are a tool first deployed by the Bank of Japan in 2001, and then used more widely by the Federal Reserve, European Central Bank, and the Bank of England…
Financial Reporting for Employee Stock Options: Liabilities or Equity?
This study seeks to determine whether employee stock options share key characteristics of liabilities or equity. Consistent with warrant pricing theory, we find that common equity risk and expected return are negatively associated with the extent…
Market-Based Bank Capital Regulation
Today’s regulatory rules, especially the easily-manipulated measures of regulatory capital, have led to costly bank failures. We design a robust regulatory system such that (i) bank losses are credibly borne by the private sector (ii)…
Pioneering Women on Boards: Pathways of the First Female Directors
We examine the biographies and professional experiences of the female directors of Fortune 250 companies. How have pathways for women changed? Are the opportunities and obstacles today the same or different?
Time of Use Pricing and the Levelized Cost of Intermittent Power Generation
Weak > strong: The ironic effect of argument strength on supportive advocacy
When people seek support for a cause, they typically present the strongest case they can muster. The present research suggests that under some conditions, the opposite strategy may be superior—in particular, presenting weak rather than strong…
Why Gaussian macro-finance term structure models are (nearly) unconstrained factor-VARs
This paper explores the implications of filtering and no-arbitrage for the maximum likelihood estimates of the entire conditional distribution of the risk factors and bond yields in Gaussian macro-finance term structure model (…
A Real Look at Real World Corporate Governance
A Real Look at Real World Corporate Governance takes a practical look at issues involving the board of directors, CEO succession planning, executive compensation, and accounting and internal controls. Written in a clear and…
The Effectiveness of Domestic Content Criteria in India's Solar Mission
Often, a goal of renewable energy policies is the development of domestic renewable energy technology manufacturing capacity. The Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission (NSM) in India is an example; besides targeting an installation of 20 GW of…
2013 Executive Coaching Survey
Nearly two-thirds of CEOs do not receive outside leadership advice, but nearly all want it. “Lonely at the top” resonates for most CEOs.
“It’s lonely at the top” appears to be truer than ever, according to a new study conducted by the…
Advertising Competition in Presidential Elections
Presidential candidates purchase advertising based on each state’s potential to tip the election. The structure of the Electoral College concentrates spending in battleground states, such that a majority of voters are ignored. We estimate an…
Carbon in the Classroom: Lessons from a Simulation of California's Electricity Market Under a Stringent Cap-and-Trade System
To better understand how a cap-and-trade market might function under high-carbon-price conditions, the authors ran a simulation called the ‘Electricity Strategy Game’ created by Severin Borenstein and James Bushnell. Among its most startling…
Financial Contracts with Recontracting
This paper presents a tractable model of dynamic moral hazard with purely pecuniary private benefits. To obtain a tractable but binding moral hazard problem, I introduce recontracting: the agent can offer a new continuation contract to the…
Levelized Product Cost: Concept and Decision Relevance
This paper examines a life-cycle cost concept that applies to both manufacturing and service industries in which upfront capacity investments are essential. Borrowing from the energy literature, we refer to this cost measure as the levelized…
Oblivious Equilibrium for Concentrated Industries
This paper explores the application of oblivious equilibrium to concentrated industries. We define an extended notion of oblivious equilibrium that we call partially oblivious equilibrium (POE) that allows for there to be a set of “dominant firms…
Observations on the Financial Crisis
The financial shock of September 2008 occurred five years ago. The effects are still with us. In this essay we draw on our experiences 2 in the Bush White House and our work and teaching since then to offer views on recent economic history. We…
Power, moral clarity, and punishment in the workplace
We propose that power increases how severely people punish transgressors. Further, we argue that this greater severity stems from an increased sense of moral clarity instilled by the psychological experience of power. We investigate the linkages…
The Diversification Discount: Fundamentals or Accounting Rules?
No abstract available.
The Relation between Equity Incentives and Misreporting: The Role of Risk-Taking Incentives
Prior research argues that a manager whose wealth is more sensitive to changes in the firm’s stock price has a greater incentive to misreport. However, if the manager is risk-averse and misreporting increases both equity values and equity risk,…