Publications

Drawing on a large sample of publicly available curricula vitae, this paper traces the career transitions of federal and state U.S. banking regulators and provides basic facts on worker flows between the regulatory and private sectors resulting…

Many companies have made significant investments in socially responsible production practices for their products. Environmentally safe cleaning products, fair trade coffee, and sustainable seafood are just a few examples. In this paper, we…

Depression is typically diagnosed as being present or absent. However, depression severity is believed to be continuously distributed rather than dichotomous. Severity may vary for a given patient daily and seasonally as a function of many…

Inefficiency and inequity are two challenges that plague humanitarian operations and health delivery in resource-limited regions. Increasing capacity in humanitarian and health delivery supply chains is one option that has the potential to…

This paper investigates whether the U.S. repatriation tax for U.S. multinational corporations (MNCs) affects foreign investment. Prior research shows that repatriation tax costs are positively associated with cash overseas, but the use of such…

This article discusses the role of GAAP accounting from an investor’s perspective.  For all its flaws, a historical-based system of accounting is vital to the investment community, and I believe moves toward fair value accounting should…

Using bottom-up information gleaned 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…

This paper studies the role of ex-ante information asymmetries in second price, common value auctions. Motivated by information structures that arise commonly in applications such as online advertising, we seek to understand what types of…

This study found that nearly all companies describe their ideal shareholder as having a long-term investment horizon, but that about half of companies’ shareholder base has a short- or medium-term horizon. As a result, the authors find,…

We document some early effects of how mobile devices might change Internet and retail commerce. We present three main findings based on an analysis of eBay’s mobile shopping application and core Internet platform. First, early adopters of mobile…

This paper offers a tractable and fully rational model to study the economics of reputation in a dynamic market with limited record-keeping, i.e., a market in which new entrants observe only the last few periods of play of the long-run player…

We investigate the role of networks of military alliances in preventing or encouraging wars between groups of countries. A country is vulnerable to attack if some allied group of countries can defeat the defending country and its (remaining)…

In this article, we use a regression discontinuity design to estimate the causal effect of incumbency on campaign contributions in the U.S. House and state legislatures. In both settings, incumbency causes approximately a 20–25 percentage-point…

This paper considers dynamic moral hazard settings, in which the agent’s actions have consequences in the future. To maintain incentives, the optimal contract ties deferred compensation and termination to future performance. Some of the…

Performance appraisal is one of the cornerstones of management control systems. Although this topic has been the subject of considerable prior research, most of this work is based on a single observation per firm or performance appraisal…

This paper examines the optimal degree of centralization that can be achieved with respect to bailout policies when a central authority cannot supervise the entire banking system of the economy. Part of the banking system is supervised by a local…

Systematic risk is an important determinant of corporate capital structure. A one standard deviation increase in asset beta corresponds to a decrease in leverage of 13%, controlling for total asset volatility. This evidence is consistent with…