Publications

I examine the conditions under which trade can support peaceful coexistence and prosperity when particular social and ethnic groups are cheap targets of violence. A simple theoretical framework reveals that for a broad set of cases, while…

Researchers have become increasingly interested in how narcissistic leaders influence people and organizations. Some studies have shown that narcissistic leaders positively influence their firms because people are drawn to their grandiose visions…

In the years leading up to the financial crisis that began in 2007, the core of the financial system was vulnerable to major shocks emanating from any of a variety of sources. While this particular crisis was triggered by over-levered home owners…

Consider an extensive-form mechanism, run by an auctioneer who communicates sequentially and privately with agents. Suppose the auctioneer can deviate from the rules provided that no single agent detects the deviation. A mechanism is credible if…

Large-scale (e.g., national) programs could strengthen safety culture, which is foundational to patient safety, yet we know little about how to optimize this potential. In 2013, Brazil’s Ministry of Health launched the National Patient Safety…

This paper examines disadvantaged group members’ perceptions of successful individuals from their group (e.g., women perceiving a successful woman). We find that women’s perceptions of a successful woman’s ties to the group and willingness to…

Latinos own 350,000 employer businesses in the U.S., creating nearly 3 million American jobs, and driving a GDP of more than $2 trillion. The Latino population in the U.S. has more than doubled since the 1990s, growing from 8 percent to 18…

Chosen by the JFS Associate Editors and Editor-in-Chief as a 2018 JFS Noteworthy Article.

Motivated by the debate over how to deal with the huge backlog of untested sexual assault kits in the U.S.A., we construct and analyze a…

Social movement scholarship has increasingly sought to understand the relational dynamics of internal movement activity, from investigating the factors that enable movement coalitions to analyzing the trade-offs of organizational hybridity. We…

The platform design, the process that helps potential buyers on the internet navigate toward products they may purchase, plays a critical role in reducing search frictions and determining market outcomes. We study a key trade-off associated with…

Whether an idea, information, or infection diffuses throughout a society depends not only on the structure of the network of interactions, but also on the timing of those interactions. People are not always available to interact with others, and…

This paper studies sourcing decisions of firms in a multi-tier supply chain when procurement is subject to disruption risk. We argue that features of the production process that are commonly encountered in practice (including differential…

Research over the past decade has shown that various personality traits are communicated through musical preferences. One limitation of that research is external validity, as most studies have assessed individual differences in musical…

We formulate a private learning model to study an intrinsic tradeoff between privacy and query complexity in sequential learning. Our model involves a learner who aims to determine a scalar value, v∗, by sequentially querying an external database…

We study the effect of imperfect memory on decision making in the context of a stochastic sequential action- reward problem. An agent chooses a sequence of actions which generate discrete rewards at different rates. She is allowed to make…

We study trading behavior and the properties of prices in informationally complex markets. Our model is based on the single‐period version of the linear‐normal framework of Kyle (1985). We allow for essentially arbitrary correlations among the…

Energy storage will be key to overcoming the intermittency and variability of renewable energy sources, like wind and solar power. This paper proposes a cost metric for measuring the cost of energy storage and for identifying optimally sized…

We examine the effect of firm-specific business disruptions on the performance of small firms in emerging markets. We study the impact of both managerial disruptions (which result in the absence of the entrepreneur-owner or more broadly a key…

Winner 2017 BlackRock Applied Research Award

AQR Top Finance Graduate Award 2018

We provide evidence that a weak banking sector contributed to low productivity following the European debt crisis. An…

This paper shows that the frequency of capital structure adjustment varies significantly across firms. The most active 25% of firms account for 51% of leverage adjustments, while the least active 50% of firms account for only 19% of such events.…