Publications

We examine the pricing of financial crash insurance during the 2007-2009 financial crisis in U.S. option markets. A large amount of aggregate tail risk is missing from the price of financial sector crash insurance during the financial crisis. The…

This paper studies the joint effect of conservatism and aggregation on the cost of equity capital and the efficiency of debt contracts. In the model, a firm’s two assets are valued at either the lower-of-cost-or-market or fair value and the…

The bullwhip effect is the amplification of demand variability along a supply chain: a company bullwhips if it purchases from suppliers more variably than it sells to customers. Such bullwhips (amplifications of demand variability) can lead to…

Study conducted by The Conference Board, NASDAQ, and the …

This study examines the sources of credit risk associated with asset securitizations and whether credit-rating agencies and the bond market differ in their assessment of this risk. Measuring credit risk using credit ratings, we find the…

We analyze shareholders’ incentives to change the leverage of a firm that has already borrowed substantially. As a result of debt overhang, shareholders have incentives to resist reductions in leverage that make the remaining debt safer. This…

The article presents a non-governmental organization (NGO) influencing environmental laws compliance in China. Focused is the nonprofit Institute of Public & Environmental Affairs (IPE) wherein it has exposed polluting factories in China that…

Some conflicts are experienced as depleting and exhausting whereas others are experienced as stimulating and invigorating. We explored the possibility that the focus of perceived threat in conflict determines whether it produces taxing…

Do movie studios inflate box office estimates that they report every Sunday? Is the pattern of this inflation consistent with the studios’ strategic incentives? Analyzing actual and estimated box office returns of major movie releases…

The sudden death of a CEO can provide insight into the quality of succession planning at a company. Why don’t more companies have a truly operational plan in place?

In 2008, the U.S. debt held by the public was $5.8 trillion. By the end of 2012, just four years later, it will likely be about double that number. The debt averaged 38.5 percent of GDP over the thirty years ending in 2008, but rose by about 10…

Entrepreneurs that were employed by successful industry incumbents prior to founding tend to confer advantages on their new organizations. We propose and then demonstrate a similar “network progeny” effect rooted in the social relationships that…

Free-riding is at the core of environmental problems. If a climate coalition reduces its emissions, world prices change and nonparticipants typically emit more; they may also extract the dirtiest type of fossil fuel and invest too little in green…

We examine the relation between corporate governance and firms’ information environments. We use the passage of state antitakeover laws in…

This article finds that, when faced with racial inequity framed as White advantage, Whites’ desire to think well of their racial group increases their support for policies perceived to harm Whites. Across 4 studies, the article provides evidence…

We use variation in wind speeds at surfing locations in Switzerland as exogenous shifters of users’ propensity to post content about their surfing activity onto an online social network. We exploit this variation to test whether users online…

Bridging the literatures on social dilemmas, intergroup conflict, and social hierarchy, the authors systematically varied the intergroup context in which social dilemmas were embedded to investigate how costly contributions to public goods…

We use a proprietary data set with detailed executive compensation information to examine the relationship between the incentives of the tax director…

We study the relationship between Facebook popularity (number of contacts) and personality traits on a large number of subjects. We test to which extent two prevalent viewpoints hold. That is, popular users (those with many social contacts) are…

Under rate-of-return regulation, a firm’s product prices are constrained by the requirement that investors not earn more than an allowable return on the firm’s assets. This paper examines the dynamic properties of the rate-of-return regulation…