Publications

Union pension funds are active in the proxy process, sponsoring approximately one-third of shareholder proposals each year. How do union pension funds determine which positions to advocate and which companies to target? Are their proposals made…

We study a model in which managers’ disclosure and investment decisions are both endogenous and managers can manipulate their voluntary reports through (suboptimal) investment, financing, or operating decisions. Managers are privately informed…

Competition for seats in elite U.S. graduate school programs has intensified

dramatically over the past 40 years. In this paper, we study the market for

young attorneys to illuminate the role that elite graduate programs play in…

Free spaces are arenas insulated from the control of elites in organizations and societies. A basic question is whether they incubate challenges to authority. We suggest that free spaces foster collective empowerment when they assemble large…

Presidential elections provide both an important context in which to study advertising and a setting that mitigates the challenges of dynamics and endogeneity. We use the 2000 and 2004 general elections to analyze the effect of market-level…

We present a model for the equilibrium movement of capital between asset markets that are distinguished only by the levels of capital invested in each. Investment in that market with the greatest amount of capital earns the lowest risk premium.…

We propose that category membership can operate as a collective market signal for quality when low-quality producers face higher costs of gaining membership. The strength of membership as a collective signal increases with the distinctiveness, or…

We review the last two decades of research in dynamic corporate finance, focusing on capital structure and the financing of investment. We first cover continuous time contingent claims models, starting with real options models, and working…

This paper studies information aggregation in dynamic markets with partially informed strategic traders. A natural condition on traded securities and information structure, “separability,” is introduced. If a security is separable, information…

For millions of people across Africa, health interventions such as vaccines, HIV counseling and treatment, and other public health expertise are out of reach. Barriers to health care can include shortage of health personnel, scarcity of medicines…

Americans tend to admire powerful leaders. However, it is not clear the extent to which having a powerful CEO is beneficial to an organization. How much power is too much power?

Most legislatures require the consent of only a simple majority to pass a proposal, so why donʼt legislative outcomes favor only a bare majority? We show that compromise can be achieved if legislators are neither too impatient nor too patient,…

Consumers often need to search for product information before making purchase decisions. We consider a tractable (continuous-time) model of gradual learning, in which consumers incur search costs to learn further product information, and update…

The experiences of the largest corporation in the world and those of a start-up company show how companies can profitably reduce greenhouse gas emissions in their supply chains. The operations management literature suggests additional…

Recently, shareholder groups have sued companies for inadequate disclosure in the annual proxy. They allege that companies provide insufficient disclosure to determine how to vote on “say on pay.” If a company follows SEC guidelines, why is this…

Understanding the mechanisms by which political advertising affects voters is crucial for evaluating the welfare effects of campaign finance and election regulation. This paper develops a method to distinguish between two alternative mechanisms…

New research finds a serious gap between executives’ knowledge about social media and its use at their companies.

Less than a third of companies today use social media to support their corporate strategy and risk management practices,…

Intuition suggests that firms with higher cash holdings should be “safer” and have lower credit spreads. Yet empirically, the correlation between cash and spreads is robustly positive. This puzzling finding can be explained by the precautionary…

The paper presents a dynamic game where players contribute to a public bad, invest in technologies, and write incomplete contracts. Despite the n + 1 stocks in the model, the analysis is tractable and the symmetric Markov perfect equilibrium…

We study optimal compensation in a dynamic framework where the CEO consumes in multiple periods, can undo the contract by privately saving, and can temporarily inflate earnings. We obtain a simple closed-form contract that yields clear…