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Bounding Equilibrium Payoffs in Repeated Games With Private Monitoring
We provide a simple sufficient condition for the existence of a recursive upper bound on (the Pareto frontier of) the sequential equilibrium payoff set at a fixed discount factor in two-player repeated games with imperfect private monitoring. The…
Estimating Average Treatment Effects: Supplementary Analyses and Remaining Challenges
There is a large literature on semiparametric estimation of average treatment effects under unconfounded treatment assignment in settings with a fixed number of covariates. More recently attention has focused on settings with a large number of…
Healthier Than Thou? “Practicing What You Preach” Backfires by Increasing Anticipated Devaluation.
In the article, the beginning phrase of the second paragraph of the Internal Meta-Analysis of Studies 3 Through 5 section is incorrect. It should instead begin as follows: Across the three studies. The Monin et al. (2014) reference in both the…
How do Investors Compute the Discount Rate? They Use the CAPM
We provide guidance to corporate managers and investors on how to select the discount rate when evaluating investment opportunities. When making corporate investment decisions on behalf of the equity investors in a firm, an obvious choice is to…
Moral Traps: When Self-Serving Attributions Backfire in Prosocial Behavior
Two assumptions guide the current research. First, people’s desire to see themselves as moral disposes them to make attributions that enhance or protect their moral self-image: When approached with a prosocial request, people are inclined to…
On the Pursuit of Desired Attitudes: Wanting a Different Attitude Affects Information Processing and Behavior
Recent work suggests that in addition to actual attitudes, people often have desired attitudes that can vary in their congruence with their actual attitudes. We explored whether desired attitudes motivate goal-congruent outcomes by impacting…
Retired or Fired: How Can Investors Tell if a CEO Was Pressured to Leave?
CEO succession at many companies occurs in a black box. Shareholders are not privy to boardroom discussions prior to the announcement of a CEO departure, and press releases announcing the change contain boilerplate language that does not make it…
Spillovers Inside Conglomerates: Incentives and Capital
Using hand-collected data on divisional managers at conglomerates, we find that a change in industry surplus in one division generates large spillovers on managerial payoffs in other divisions of the same firm. These spillovers arise only…
The Role of Government Reimbursement in Drug Shortages
Beginning in the mid-2000s, the incidence of drug shortages rose, especially for generic injectable drugs such as anesthetics and chemotherapy treatments. We examine whether reimbursement changes contributed to the shortages, focusing on a…
The State of Applied Econometrics: Causality and Policy Evaluation
In this paper, we discuss recent developments in econometrics that we view as important for empirical researchers working on policy evaluation questions. We focus on three main areas, in each case, highlighting recommendations for applied work.…
Uncovering Expected Returns: Information in Analyst Coverage Proxies
We show that analyst coverage proxies contain information about expected returns. We decompose analyst coverage into abnormal and expected components using a simple characteristic-based model and show that firms with abnormally high analyst…
Yuliy Sannikov: Winner of the 2016 Clark Medal
Yuliy Sannikov is an extraordinary theorist who has developed methods that offer new insights in analyzing problems that had seemed well-studied and familiar: for example, decisions that might bring about cooperation and/or defection in a…
Stock Price Management and Share Issuance: Evidence from Equity Warrants
We address whether firms manage stock prices in anticipation of share issuances. A literature in finance attributes negative returns following share issuances to market timing, whereas studies in accounting interpret similar return patterns as…
Is Operating Flexibility Harmful Under Debt?
We study the inefficiencies stemming from a firm’s operating flexibility under debt. We find that flexibility in replenishing or liquidating inventory, by providing risk-shifting incentives, could lead to borrowing costs that erase more than one-…
The Cross-Section and Time-Series of Stock and Bond Returns
We show that bond factors, which predict future U.S. economic activity at business cycle horizons, are priced in the cross-section of U.S. stock returns. High book-to-market stocks have larger exposures to these bond factors than low book-to-…
Capital Share Dynamics When Firms Insure Workers
Although the aggregate capital share for U.S. firms has increased, the firm-level capital share has decreased on average. The divergence is due to the largest firms. While these mega-firms now produce a larger output share, their labor…
Bias in Cable News: Real Effects and Polarization
We measure the persuasive effects of slanted news and tastes for like-minded news, exploiting cable channel positions as exogenous shifters of cable news viewership. Channel positions do not correlate with demographics that predict viewership and…
It's the Conventional Thought That Counts: How Third-Order Inference Produces Status Advantage
A core claim of sociological theory is that modern institutions fall short of their meritocratic ideals, whereby rewards should be allocated based on achievement-related criteria. Instead, high-status actors often experience a “status advantage…
An Activist View of CEO Compensation
Understanding CEO compensation plans is a continuing challenge for directors and investors. The disclosure of these plans is dictated by SEC rules that rely heavily on the “fair value” of awards at the time they are granted. The problem with…
Bank Earnings and Regulatory Capital Management using Available for Sale Securities
Based on a large sample of publicly listed and non-listed US commercial banks from 1996 to 2011, we find robust evidence consistent with banks using realized available for sale (AFS) securities gains and losses to smooth earnings and increase low…