Publications

We hypothesize that two distinct facets of religiosity—orthodoxy (an emphasis on belief) and orthopraxy (an emphasis on behavior)—predict differential sensitivity to an actor’s intent when making moral judgments. Participants judged actors who…

While creative ideas are defined as both novel and useful, novelty and usefulness often diverge, making it difficult to develop ideas that are high in both. To explain this tradeoff between novelty and usefulness and how it can be overcome, this…

Using bottom-up information from corporate financial statements, we examine the relation between aggregate investment, future equity returns, and investor sentiment. Consistent with the business cycle literature, corporate investments peak during…

Using the value that a mutual fund extracts from capital markets as the measure of skill, we find that the average mutual fund has used this skill to generate about $3.2 million per year. We document large cross-sectional differences in skill…

This paper examines whether insiders at leading financial institutions anticipated the effect of government intervention during the Financial Crisis on their firms’ share prices. While we find no evidence that insiders anticipated the Crisis, we…

Job titles help organizations manage their human capital and have far-reaching implications for employees’ identities. Because titles do not always reflect the unique value that employees bring to their jobs, some organizations have recently…

This paper calculates the effect that introducing risk-sharing during either retirement or the working life would have on public sector pension liabilities. We begin by considering the introduction of a variable annuity for the retirement phase…

It is known that organizations benefit from stability, but that they often are compelled to change by circumstances. We argue that the relationship between organizational stability and change hinges on a key…

Term limits remain a popular policy reform and have generated a great deal of scholarship as a result. Although many predicted that term limits would benefit the Republican party, the literature finds no marked partisan effects, possibly because…

At a time of a high level of polarization in Congress, public opinion surveys routinely find that Americans want politicians to compromise. When evaluating legislation, does the preference for bipartisanship in the legislative process trump…

During the past few decades, punitive crime policies have led to explosive growth in the United States prison population. Such policies have contributed to unprecedented incarceration rates for Blacks in particular. In this article, we consider…

Persistent unemployment after recessions and the policies required to bring it down are the subject of an ongoing debate. One view suggests there are fundamental changes in the labor market that imply a long-term higher rate of unemployment,…

Narayana Hrudayalaya Cardiac Hospital (NHCH) in Bangalore, India (now known as the Narayana Institute of Cardiac Sciences), is one of the world’s largest and busiest cardiac hospitals. In early 2009, NHCH experienced a sharp increase in the…

Consumer choice is often based on the relative visual appeal of competing products. Lay intuition, common marketing practice, and extant literature all suggest that more visual impressions help consumers distinguish products. This research shows…

I examine how the historical legacies of inter-ethnic complementarity and competition interact with contemporary electoral competition in shaping patterns of ethnic violence. Using local comparisons within Gujarat, a single Indian state…

We propose a new form of hybrid capital for banks, Equity Recourse Notes (ERNs), which ameliorate booms and bust by creating counter-cyclical incentives for banks to raise capital, and so encourage bank lending in bad times. They avoid the…

Traditional academic literature has relied on so-called “limits to arbitrage” theories to explain why investment managers are unable to eliminate the effects of investor “irrational” preferences (either the asset-pricing anomalies or the…

Applying a “co-search” algorithm to Internet traffic at the SEC’s EDGAR website, we develop a novel method for identifying economically-related peer firms. Our results show that firms appearing in chronologically adjacent searches by the same…

This study investigates the affect on new venture performance after a regulatory change that motivated the entry of more elite founders because bankruptcy consequences were moderated. Prior research on policy efforts to stimulate entrepreneurship…

This study endogenously generates the asymmetric verification concept of conservatism, using evolutionary biology as a foundation. A producer produces (or hunts) a consumable with a stochastic production technology,…