Publications

We provide the first large‐scale empirical evidence of banks functioning as tax planning intermediaries. We posit that some banks specialize in assisting corporate clients with tax planning. In this role, banks make use of their centrality in…

The ability to distinguish between people in setting the price of credit is often constrained by legal rules that aim to prevent discrimination. These legal requirements have developed focusing on human decision-making contexts, and so their…

This Research Spotlight provides a summary of the academic literature on how dual-class share structures influence firm value and corporate governance quality. It reviews the evidence of:

• The relation between dual-class shares and…

Recent Medicare legislation has been directed at improving patient care quality by financially penalizing providers for hospital-acquired infections (HAIs). However, Medicare cannot directly monitor HAI rates, and instead relies on providers…

We administer a newly-designed survey to a large panel of retail investors who have substantial wealth invested in financial markets. The survey elicits beliefs that are crucial for macroeconomics and finance, and matches respondents with…

Nearly everywhere the population is getting older, and these swelling ranks of 55 and older people represent a massive and important market opportunity. Their purchasing power is already $7.6 trillion in the US alone. But there’s a big gap…

Motivated by diverse application areas such as healthcare, call centers, and crowdsourcing, we consider the design and operation of service systems that process tasks with types that are ex ante unknown, and employ servers with different skill…

Choosing a health insurance plan is difficult for many people, and patient-centered decision support may help consumers make these choices. We tested whether providing a patient-centered decision-support tool—with or without machine-based,…

We develop and estimate a dynamic model of risk-shifting over the business cycle. First, equity holders with Epstein-Zin preferences increase their taking of idiosyncratic risk substantially more than the standard model in repeated games, because…

Psychologists have long sought to understand how people experience, think, and communicate about situations. Psychology’s protracted journey toward understanding psychological situations recently took a momentous turn toward more rigorous…

The pervasiveness, persistence, and petrifying scope of intergroup conflict have fueled substantial scholarly interest in intergroup conflict across the social and biological sciences. Here we outline five questions that we hope students of…

We examine the long-term effects of interventions by activist hedge funds. Research documents positive equal-weighted long-term returns and operating performance improvements following activist interventions, and typically conclude that activism…

The recent sharp decline in the cost of renewable energy suggests that the production of hydrogen from renewable power through a power-to-gas process might become more economical. Here we examine this alternative from the perspective of an…

This study investigates whether investors are willing to trade-off wealth for societal benefits. We take advantage of unique institutional features of the municipal securities market to provide insight into this question. Since 2013, over $23…

We apply causal forests to a dataset derived from the National Study of Learning Mindsets, and consider resulting practical and conceptual challenges. In particular, we discuss how causal forests use estimated propensity scores to be more…

We examine the selection of peer groups that boards of directors use when setting the level of CEO compensation. This choice is controversial because it is difficult to ascertain whether peer groups are selected to (i) attract and retain top…

How do U.S. companies respond to incentives intended to encourage domestic manufacturing? I study the Domestic Production Activities Deduction (DPAD), which was enacted in the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 and was the third largest U.S.…

We examine the relation between tax net operating loss (NOL) carryforwards and corporate cash holdings. Corporate taxation of passive income increases the cost of holding liquid assets (“cash”), but NOLs can shield that income from tax. We test…

The paper considers a model of competition among firms that produce a homogeneous good in a networked environment. A bipartite graph determines which subset of markets a firm can supply to. Firms compete à la Cournot and decide how to allocate…

We use a massive, matched employer-employee database for the United States to analyze the contribution of firms to the rise in earnings inequality from 1978 to 2013. We find that one-third of the rise in the variance of (log) earnings occurred…