Publications

Among the controversies in corporate governance, perhaps none is more heated or widely debated across society than that of CEO pay. The views that American citizens have on CEO pay is centrally important because public opinion influences…

New research from the Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University and the Diligent Institute finds that corporate directors are not as shareholder-centric as commonly believed and that companies do not put the needs of…

Forty-five years ago, power as a topic was mostly absent from management textbooks and courses, including executive education teaching, in the fields of business and public administration. This was the case notwithstanding the…

A common challenge in estimating the long-term impacts of treatments (e.g., job training programs) is that the outcomes of interest (e.g., lifetime earnings) are observed with a long delay. We address this problem by combining several short-term…

We examine how U.S. individuals respond to regulation intended to reduce offshore tax evasion. The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) requires foreign financial institutions to report information to the U.S. government regarding U.S.…

We investigate the effect of patent disclosures on corporate innovation. Using the American Inventor’s Protection Act (AIPA) as a shock that increased patent disclosures, we find an increase in innovation for firms whose rivals reveal more…

Viral outrage—the piling up of online condemnation in response to offensive remarks—is a common expression of moral judgment in the digital age. We examined whether viral outrage is effective in convincing observers that an offender is…

We show that household consumption displays excess sensitivity to salient macro-economic news. When the announced local unemployment rate reaches a 12-month maximum, local consumers in that area reduce discretionary spending by 2% relative to…

We study repeated games in which players learn the unknown state of the world by observing a sequence of noisy private signals. We find that for generic signal distributions, the folk theorem obtains using ex-post equilibria. In our…

In late 2008, the world’s financial system was teetering on the brink of systemic collapse. While the impacts of the global financial crisis would be felt immediately, at every level of the economy, it would also send years-long aftershocks…

We establish a link between firms managing investors’ performance expectations, earnings announcement premia, and cyclical patterns (i.e., seasonalities) in returns. Firms that are more likely to manage expectations toward beatable levels…

The market value of outstanding government debt reflects the expected present discounted value of current and future primary surpluses. When the discount rate is consistent with the term structure of interest rates and equity prices and…

Drawing on the universe of California income tax filings and the variation imposed by a 2012 tax increase of up to 3 percentage points for high-income households, we present new findings about the effects of personal income taxation on household…

We develop a field experiment that assesses whether advertising can serve as a signal that enhances consumers’ evaluations of advertised goods. We implement the experiment on a mobile search platform that provides listings and reviews for an…

In this paper, I develop a model in which risk-averse investors possess private information regarding both a stock’s expected payoff and its risk. These investors trade in the stock and a derivative whose payoff is driven by the stock’s risk. In…

We study firms that go public through reverse mergers (RMs) versus initial public offerings (IPOs) in China. Using a manually assembled data set, we show that pre-listing RM firms are larger, more profitable, and less politically connected than…

We study firms that go public through reverse mergers (RMs) versus initial public offerings …

People pursue goals throughout their lives, and many of these attempts end happily — a goal is achieved. However, what facilitates the continuation of behaviors that are aligned with the completed goal, such as continuing to monitor food intake…

A reliable system of corporate governance is considered to be an important requirement for the long-term success of a company. Unfortunately, after decades of research, we still do not have a clear understanding of the factors that make a…

Systemic risk arises when shocks lead to states where a disruption in financial intermediation adversely affects the economy and feeds back into further disrupting financial intermediation. We present a macroeconomic model with a financial…