Publications

Persistent unemployment after recessions and the policies required to bring it down are the subject of an ongoing debate. One view suggests there are fundamental changes in the labor market that imply a long-term higher rate of unemployment,…

Narayana Hrudayalaya Cardiac Hospital (NHCH) in Bangalore, India (now known as the Narayana Institute of Cardiac Sciences), is one of the world’s largest and busiest cardiac hospitals. In early 2009, NHCH experienced a sharp increase in the…

Consumer choice is often based on the relative visual appeal of competing products. Lay intuition, common marketing practice, and extant literature all suggest that more visual impressions help consumers distinguish products. This research shows…

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…

We propose a new form of hybrid capital for banks, Equity Recourse Notes (ERNs), which ameliorate booms and bust by creating counter-cyclical incentives for banks to raise capital, and so encourage bank lending in bad times. They avoid the…

Traditional academic literature has relied on so-called “limits to arbitrage” theories to explain why investment managers are unable to eliminate the effects of investor “irrational” preferences (either the asset-pricing anomalies or the…

Applying a “co-search” algorithm to Internet traffic at the SEC’s EDGAR website, we develop a novel method for identifying economically-related peer firms. Our results show that firms appearing in chronologically adjacent searches by the same…

This study investigates the affect on new venture performance after a regulatory change that motivated the entry of more elite founders because bankruptcy consequences were moderated. Prior research on policy efforts to stimulate entrepreneurship…

This study endogenously generates the asymmetric verification concept of conservatism, using evolutionary biology as a foundation. A producer produces (or hunts) a consumable with a stochastic production technology,…

Prosper, today the second largest social lending marketplace with nearly 1.5 million members and $380 million in funded loans, employed an auction mechanism amongst lenders to finance each borrower’s loan until 2010. Given that a basic premise of…

Corporations dedicate significant time to managing their shareholder base. Does the composition of a company’s shareholder base really impact corporate decision making and stock-market value?

This paper studies the interaction between default and liquidity for corporate bonds that are traded in an over-the-counter secondary market with search frictions. Bargaining with dealers determines a bond’s endogenous liquidity, which depends on…

Social movements occupy a shared ideational and resource space, which is often referred to as the social movement sector. This article contributes to the understanding of the relational dynamics of the social movement sector by demonstrating how…

How do Americans organize their political beliefs? This paper argues that party polarization and the growing prominence of moral issues in recent decades have catalyzed different responses by different groups of Americans. The paper investigates…

We develop a model of experimentation and learning in policymaking when control of power is temporary. We demonstrate how an early office holder who would otherwise not experiment is nonetheless induced to experiment when his hold on power is…

How do firms repair their reputations after a serious accounting restatement? To answer this question, we review firms’ press releases and identify 1,765 reputation-building actions taken by: (i) 94 restating firms in the periods before and after…

We examine variation in the rate of divestment by multinational firms from Burma. We argue that in addition to a set of firm-level characteristics known to impact divestment decisions, firms are also influenced by characteristics of their home…

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

Over the past three decades, the earnings of workers with a college education have substantially increased relative to those with less education. In 1980, the average college graduate earned 38% more than the average high school graduate. By 2000…

We review research on revenue models used by online firms who offer digital goods. Such goods are non-rival, have near zero marginal cost of production and distribution, low marginal cost of consumer search, and low transaction costs.…