Publications

This Research Spotlight provides a summary of the academic literature on shareholder activism, including:

• The impact of union activism on corporate outcomes.
• The performance of socially responsible investment funds.
…

Social norms are a powerful force in organizations. While different literatures across fields have developed differing definitions and categories, social norms are commonly defined as and divided into descriptive norms, i.e., the most commonly…

In this survey, more than 3,000 stakeholders from the nonprofit sector—including nonprofit executives and staff, board members, and donors—provided detailed information about the leadership and management practices of a nonprofit organization…

This study shows that initiation of credit default swap (CDS) trading for an entity’s debt increases the share of loans retained by loan syndicate lead arrangers and increases loan spread. These findings are consistent with CDS initiation…

Firms’ inability to commit to future funding choices has profound consequences for capital structure dynamics. With debt in place, shareholders pervasively resist leverage reductions no matter how much such reductions may enhance firm value.…

We extend the emergent lens on strategy formulation by arguing that great strategies arise from insurgent identity movements. In motivating the paper, we depict Steve Jobs as an activist constituted by the personal computing movement that…

We study how debt frictions and demand affect corporate investment using administrative data from a large temporary investment tax credit in Portugal. We obtain exogenous variation in demand for exporting firms from product-destination-level…

This paper contributes to a recent thrust in the OM literature on how various sorts of transparency influence social and environmental responsibility in a supply chain. In practice, companies are under pressure to publish their supplier lists and…

Dominant theories of legislative organization in the U.S. rest on the notion that the majority party arranges legislative matters to enhance its electoral fortunes. Yet, we find little evidence for a short-term electoral advantage for the…

This paper finds evidence of return predictability across technology-linked firms.  Employing a classic measure of technological closeness between firms, we show that the returns of technology-linked firms have strong predictive power for…

In empirical work in economics it is common to report standard errors that account for clustering of units. Typically, the motivation given for the clustering adjustments is that unobserved components in outcomes for units within clusters are…

We examine the long-term consequences of teacher discretion in grading of high stakes tests. Bunching in Swedish math test score distributions reveal that teachers inflate students who have “a bad test day,” but do not discriminate based on…

We use trade-level data to examine the role of mutual funds (MFs) in earnings news dissemination. MFs trade (172%) more on earnings announcement (EA) days than on non-EA days. The EA trades made by MFs are reliably more profitable than their non-…

We characterize the price-transparency role of benchmarks in over-the-counter markets. A benchmark can, under conditions, raise social surplus by increasing the volume of beneficial trade, facilitating more efficient matching between dealers…

Board members rely on information provided by management to inform their decisions. Unfortunately, some research calls into question the adequacy of the information the board members receive and, by extension, the quality of decisions they are…

This article provides a flexible model of resource extraction, such as deforestation, and derives the optimal conservation contract. When property rights are “strong” and districts are in charge of extracting their own resources to get revenues,…

I model the equilibrium risk sharing between countries with varying financial development. The most financially developed country takes greater risks because its financial intermediaries deal with funding problems better. In good times, the more…

We find that shocks to the equity capital ratio of financial intermediaries — Primary Dealer counterparties of the New York Federal Reserve — possess significant explanatory power for cross-sectional variation in expected…

As more and more instances of corporate hypocrisy become public, consumers have developed an inherent general skepticism towards firms’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) claims. As CSR skepticism bears heavily on consumers’ attitudes and…