Publications

We test for a “hot hand” (i.e., short-term predictability in performance) in Major League Baseball using panel data. We find strong evidence for its existence in all 10 statistical categories we consider. The magnitudes are significant; being “…

Objectives

The objective of this study was to understand the effect of citizen mobilization on both electoral outcomes and on the likelihood that new candidates will enter races to challenge incumbent politicians.

Methods

This paper documents facts about the state corporate tax structure — tax rates, base rules, and credits — and investigates its consequences for state tax revenue and economic activity. We present three main findings. First, tax base rules and…

Ferri, Zheng, and Zou test Fischer and Verrecchia’s (2000) prediction that a reduction in investors’ uncertainty about managers’ financial reporting objectives leads to an increase in the valuation-relevance of earnings reports. They use…

In this paper, I develop an option-pricing model that formally incorporates a disclosure event. Using the model, I first theoretically examine how two properties of the disclosure — its overall informativeness and its informativeness given good…

Steadily rising housing rents in many of the US’s large, productive cities have reignited the discussion whether to expand or enact rent control provisions. Under pressure to fight rising rents, state lawmakers in Illinois, Oregon, and California…

We study when and how intervention to stop a project is optimally used in a repeated relationship between a principal and a policymaker. The policymaker is privately informed about his ability, where a higher ability policymaker has a lower cost…

Prior to 2018, U.S. repatriation taxes motivated companies to retain cash offshore.  Using confidential jurisdiction-specific data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, we find that firms with high tax-induced foreign cash have approximately…

How do people respond to violent political protest? The authors present a theory proposing that the use of violence leads the general public to view a protest group as less reasonable, a perception that reduces identification with the group. This…

In many settings, a decision-maker wishes to learn a rule, or policy, that maps from observable characteristics of an individual to an action. Examples include selecting offers, prices, advertisements, or emails to send to consumers, as well as…

We examine the long-term effects of interventions by activist hedge funds. Prior papers document positive equal-weighted long-term returns and operating performance improvements following activist interventions, and typically conclude that…

Older Americans, even those who are long retired, have strong willingness to work, especially in jobs with flexible schedules. For many, labor force participation near or after normal retirement age is limited more by a lack of acceptable job…

I show that, in a benchmark model, debt securities minimize the welfare losses associated with the moral hazards of excessive risk-taking and lax effort. For any security design, the variance of the security payoff is a statistic that summarizes…

In summer and fall 2018, the Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University conducted a nationwide survey of 3,544 individuals — representative by gender, race, age, household income, and state residence — to understand how the…

We examine whether firms have an informational advantage in selecting arbitrators in consumer arbitration, and the impact of the arbitrator selection process on outcomes. We collect a novel data set containing roughly 9,000 arbitration cases in…

Network models of diffusion predominantly think about cultural variation as a product of social contagion. But culture does not spread like a virus. We propose an alternative explanation we call associative…

Entrepreneurship requires energy and creativity as well as business acumen. Some factors that contribute to entrepreneurship decline with age, but business skills increase with experience in high-level positions. Having too many older workers in…

This chapter discusses the insights yielded by studies examining inter- and intra-movement diffusion, with an eye toward understanding what diffuses, through which channels, and the catalysts to the diffusion process. It also discusses the…

We reassess Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels’s prominent claim that shark attacks influence presidential elections. First, we assemble data on every fatal shark attack in U.S. history and county-level returns from every presidential election…

This is a survey of progress with the postcrisis global (G20) reform of the financial system, in five key areas of new regulation: (1) making financial institutions more resilient; (2) ending “too-big-to-fail”; (3) making derivatives markets…