Publications

Excessive leverage (indebtedness) in banking endangers the public and distorts the economy. Yet current and proposed regulations only tweak previous regulations that failed to provide financial stability. This paper discusses the forces that have…

Many believe that “big data” will transform business, government and other aspects of the economy. In this article we discuss how new data may impact economic policy and economic research. Large-scale administrative datasets and proprietary…

Since 1950, 13 economies have grown at an average rate of 7 percent a year or more for 25 years or longer. At that pace of expansion, an economy almost doubles in size every decade. This report is about sustained, high growth of this kind: its…

Although the 1997 Handover of Hong Kong from the United Kingdom to China ranks among the major political transformations in modern history, its impact on new business formation has not been fully scrutinized.

Theory suggests contradictory…

This paper compares two different frameworks recently introduced in the literature for measuring risk in a multi-period setting. The first corresponds to applying a single coherent risk measure to the cumulative future costs, while the…

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 known for…

This paper presents a case study of offshore oil platforms—a workplace that has traditionally rewarded men for masculine displays of prowess and interactions centered on proving masculinity—in which such displays and interactions were absent. We…

Value investing refers to the buying or selling of stocks on the basis of a perceived gap between their current market price and their fundamental value.  One of the most remarkable regularities in the asset pricing literature is the fact…

The experience of attitudinal ambivalence (subjective ambivalence) is important because it predicts key consequences of attitudes (e.g., attitude–behavior correspondence, attitude stability). However, the field’s understanding of the antecedents…

We demonstrate how information gathered from social network profiles can be used to predict personal attributes such as gender and age, religious and political views, intelligence, happiness and personality traits. Our approach is based on…

We use a unique dataset that combines information on advertising and mortgages originated by subprime lenders to study whether advertising helped consumers find cheaper mortgages. Lenders who advertise more within a region sell more expensive…

Who can wait for larger, delayed rewards rather than smaller, immediate ones? Delay discounting (DD) measures the rate at which subjective value of an outcome decreases as the length of time to obtaining it increases. Previous work has shown that…

Objective: We present a new open language analysis approach that identifies and visually summarizes the dominant naturally occurring words and phrases that most distinguished each Big Five personality trait. …

In this article we examine how social capital affects the creation of human capital. Specifically, we study how college students’ peers affect academic performance. Building on existing research, we consider the different types of peers…

Consumers face many options that are presented to them as bargains, but in reality, they only subjectively construe a fraction of them as valuable. The authors propose that consumers are particularly attracted to offers they perceive as more…

We discuss “Mandatory IFRS Reporting and Changes in Enforcement” by Christensen, Hail, and Leuz (CHL, in this issue). We begin by discussing CHL in the context of prior literature, and subsequently discuss the research design, results, and…

There is overwhelming evidence for regional variation across the United States on a range of key political, economic, social, and health indicators. However, a substantial body of research suggests that activities in each of these domains are…