Publications

We develop a model of the joint capital structure decisions of banks and their borrowers. Bank leverage of 85% or higher emerges because bank seniority both dramatically reduces bank asset volatility and incentivizes risk-taking by producing a…

Students with identical valuations for public schools but unequal outside options have different opportunity costs of revealing their preferences. Consequently, manipulable mechanisms need not resolve conflicting preferences in a Pareto-improving…

Vital scientific communications are frequently misinterpreted by the lay public as a result of motivated reasoning, where people misconstrue data to fit their political and psychological biases. In the case of climate change, some people have…

Workplace stress is exacting an ever-higher physical and psychological toll. It adversely affects productivity, drives up voluntary turnover, and costs US employers nearly $200 billion every year in healthcare costs. Many companies are aware of…

Over the past decade, solar photovoltaic (PV) power has experienced dramatic deployment growth coupled with substantial decreases in system prices. This article examines how solar PV power is currently positioned in the electricity marketplace…

Managed competition is a concept that was born in California and has achieved a measure of acceptance there. As California and the United States as a whole continue to struggle with the challenge of providing high-quality health care at a…

Organizations normally benefit from being perceived as authentic. Yet an ongoing puzzle persists about self-claims of authenticity: while the weight of findings suggests that individuals will devalue organizations touting themselves as authentic…

This study reports on the current state-of-affairs in the funding of entrepreneurship and innovations in China and provides a broad survey of academic findings on the subject. We discuss the implications of these findings for public policies…

This paper examines when and under what conditions whom to hire is a strategic decision. We identify four mechanisms involved in hiring that add to the “strategicness” of human capital decisions. We posit that, to the degree that human capital…

Effectively delegating work to others is considered critical to managerial success, as it frees up managers’ time and develops subordinates’ skills. We propose that female leaders are less likely than male leaders to capitalize on these benefits…

In this paper we study estimation of and inference for average treatment effects in a setting with panel data. We focus on the setting where units, e.g., individuals, firms, or states, adopt the policy or treatment of interest at a particular…

Two modern economic trends are the increase in firm size and advances in information technology. We explore the hypothesis that big data disproportionately benefits big firms. Because they have more economic activity and…

Forthcoming at Economica

In this essay I discuss how theoretical models in finance and economics are used in ways that make them “…

Deaton and Cartwright (2018) view the increasing popularity of randomized experiments in social sciences with some skepticism. They are concerned about the quality of the inferences in practice, and fear that researchers may not fully…

How does cultural heterogeneity in an organization relate to its underlying capacity for execution and innovation? Existing literature often understands cultural diversity as presenting a trade-off between task coordination and creative…

This study of the transformation of the mobile device industry examines how cross-boundary disruption (XBD) superseded the incumbents’ sustaining innovation, which helps explain the rapid rise of Apple and Google Android and the equally rapid…

Do others perceive the personality changes that take place between the ages of 14 and 29 in a similar fashion as the aging person him- or herself? This cross-sectional study analyzed age trajectories in self- versus other-reported Big Five…

Motivated by recent initiatives to increase transparency in procurement, we study the effects of disclosing information about previous purchases in a setting where an organization delegates its purchasing decisions to its employees. When…

We develop a tractable and versatile model of pretrial negotiation in which the negotiating parties are optimistic about the judge’s decision and anticipate the possible arrival of public information about the case prior to the trial date. The…

An important goal of community colleges is to prepare students for the labor market. But are students aware of the labor market outcomes in different majors? And how much do students weigh labor market outcomes when choosing a major? In this…