Publications

I study a dynamic model in which a decision-maker acquires information about the payoffs of different alternatives prior to making her decision. The key feature of the model is the flexibility of information: the decision-maker can choose any…

We build a dynamic model to link two empirical patterns: the negative failure probability-return relation (Campbell, Hilscher, and Szilagyi, JF, 2008) and the positive distress risk premium-return relation (Friewald, Wagner, and Zechner, JF, 2014…

Accepted at the Journal of Financial Economics

This paper develops a quantitative dynamic general equilibrium model in which households’ preferences for safe and liquid assets constitute a violation of Modigliani and Miller. I…

We model the widespread failure of contracts to share risk using available indices. A borrower and lender can share risk by conditioning repayments on an index. The lender has private information about the ability of this index to measure the…

We construct a novel measure of disclosure choice by firms. Our measure uses linguistic analysis of conference calls to flag a manager’s response as providing an explicit “non-answer” to an analyst’s question. Using our measure, about 11% of…

Brokerage and brokering are pervasive and consequential organizational phenomena. Prevailing models underscore social structure and focus on the consequences that come from brokerage—occupying a bridging position between…

Since 2015, the Stanford Latino Entrepreneurship Initiative (SLEI) has annually collected data on Latino business owners across the United States to provide timely updates on trends in Latino entrepreneurship.

This report provides academic…

We replicate eight influential papers to provide empirical evidence that, in the presence of heterogeneous treatment effects, OLS with fixed effects (FE) is generally not a consistent estimator of the average treatment effect (ATE). We propose…

Leading research is converging on the finding that citizens from immigrant-receiving nations strongly prefer the entry of high-skilled to low-skilled immigrants. Prior studies have largely interpreted this “skill premium” as deriving from…

Political science is in large part the study of power, but power itself is difficult to measure. We argue that we can use newspaper coverage — in particular, the relative amount of space devoted to particular subjects in newspapers — to measure…

We collaborated with UNICEF and launched a field experiment in Panamá to test the effectiveness of communicating different means–goal associations in promoting children’s consumption of water. This research is the first to examine whether…

I characterize the optimal financial regulation policy in an economy where financial intermediaries trade capital assets on behalf of households, but must retain an equity stake to align incentives. Financial regulation is necessary because…

Economic elites regularly seek to exert political influence. But what policies do they support? Many accounts implicitly assume economic elites are homogeneous and that increases in their political power will increase inequality. We shed new…

This Data Spotlight provides data and statistics on shareholder activism and the market for corporate control. This data supplements the issues introduced in the Quick Guides “The…

We study state taxes as a potential source of spatial misallocation in the U.S.. We build a spatial general equilibrium framework that incorporates salient features of the U.S. state tax system, and use changes in state tax rates between 1980 and…

We examine the relation between managers’ personal income tax rates and their corporate investment decisions. Using plausibly exogenous variation in federal and state tax rates, we find a positive relation between managers’ personal tax rates and…

In this Closer Look, we examine the tensions between corporate culture, financial incentives, and employee conduct as illustrated by the Wells Fargo cross-selling scandal. In 2016, Wells Fargo admitted that employees had opened as many as 2…

This study explores how and when the institutionalized classification system for products (or services) in a specific national market domain affects consumer perceptions of authenticity. We argue that “type authenticity” presupposes a well-…

We examine theoretically the role of reserves management and macro-prudential capital controls as ex-post and ex-ante safeguards, respectively, against sudden stops, and argue that these measures are complements rather than …