Publications

Prior to 2018, U.S. repatriation taxes motivated companies to retain cash offshore.  Using confidential jurisdiction-specific data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, we find that firms with high tax-induced foreign cash have approximately…

How do people respond to violent political protest? The authors present a theory proposing that the use of violence leads the general public to view a protest group as less reasonable, a perception that reduces identification with the group. This…

In many settings, a decision-maker wishes to learn a rule, or policy, that maps from observable characteristics of an individual to an action. Examples include selecting offers, prices, advertisements, or emails to send to consumers, as well as…

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

Older Americans, even those who are long retired, have strong willingness to work, especially in jobs with flexible schedules. For many, labor force participation near or after normal retirement age is limited more by a lack of acceptable job…

I show that, in a benchmark model, debt securities minimize the welfare losses associated with the moral hazards of excessive risk-taking and lax effort. For any security design, the variance of the security payoff is a statistic that summarizes…

In summer and fall 2018, the Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University conducted a nationwide survey of 3,544 individuals — representative by gender, race, age, household income, and state residence — to understand how the…

We examine whether firms have an informational advantage in selecting arbitrators in consumer arbitration, and the impact of the arbitrator selection process on outcomes. We collect a novel data set containing roughly 9,000 arbitration cases in…

Network models of diffusion predominantly think about cultural variation as a product of social contagion. But culture does not spread like a virus. We propose an alternative explanation we call associative…

Entrepreneurship requires energy and creativity as well as business acumen. Some factors that contribute to entrepreneurship decline with age, but business skills increase with experience in high-level positions. Having too many older workers in…

This chapter discusses the insights yielded by studies examining inter- and intra-movement diffusion, with an eye toward understanding what diffuses, through which channels, and the catalysts to the diffusion process. It also discusses the…

We reassess Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels’s prominent claim that shark attacks influence presidential elections. First, we assemble data on every fatal shark attack in U.S. history and county-level returns from every presidential election…

This is a survey of progress with the postcrisis global (G20) reform of the financial system, in five key areas of new regulation: (1) making financial institutions more resilient; (2) ending “too-big-to-fail”; (3) making derivatives markets…

The article focuses on the life and works of American economist and social scientist Gary Becker, who believed that economics could and should tackle serious social problems. According to the author, Becker’s approach was to extend the boundaries…

Certain markets are illicit because the supply is partly coerced, but little is known about the optimal regulation of such markets. We model a prostitution market with voluntary and coerced prostitutes and ask what regulation can restore…

We study a nutrition-sensitive agricultural program in low-income rural Zambia between 2011 and 2015. Using a pre-post design with a control group, we measure program effects along established pathways connecting agriculture to nutrition:…

Top income inequality rose sharply in the United States over the last 40 years but increased only slightly in France and Japan. Why? We explore a model in which heterogeneous entrepreneurs, broadly interpreted, exert effort to generate…

Concave hiring rules imply that firms respond more to bad shocks than to good shocks. They provide a unified explanation for several seemingly unrelated facts about employment growth in macro- and microdata. In particular, they generate…

Competence and sociability (warmth) are fundamental dimensions of social judgment in organizations. However, these qualities are frequently seen as negatively related, with mixed evidence on which is more important. In three studies (N = 993), we…

We study which types of activities migrate to the shadow banking sector, why migration occurs in some sectors, and not others, and the quantitative importance of this migration. We explore this question in the $10 trillion US residential mortgage…