Publications

There are at least three potential ways in which a CEO divorce might impact a corporation and its shareholders:

1. It might reduce the executive’s control or influence over the organization.
2. It might affect his or her…

Proxy advisory firms have long been known to influence the voting decisions of institutional investors. Now, a growing body of evidence suggests that they also influence company decisions in equity plan design. Should shareholders and the SEC be…

We introduce a model in which agents in a network can trade via bilateral contracts. We find that when continuous transfers are allowed and utilities are quasilinear, the full substitutability of preferences is sufficient to guarantee the…

As employees increasingly interact with their professional contacts in online social networks that are personal in nature, such as Facebook or Twitter, they are likely to experience a collision of their professional and personal identities…

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…

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…

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…

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)…

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?

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…

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 (…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…