Publications

This paper reviews the literature examining how costs of monitoring for, acquiring, and analyzing firm disclosures — collectively, “disclosure processing costs” — affect investor information choices, trades, and market outcomes. The…

We consider several economic uncertainty indicators for the U.S. and UK before and during the COVID-19 pandemic: implied stock market volatility, newspaper-based policy uncertainty, Twitter chatter about economic uncertainty, subjective…

Objective: 

Employers affect the health of employees and their families through work environments and employee benefits. We sought to understand employer decisions around those topics.

Methods: …

Environmental costs are a legal obligation of companies and proper corporate governance requires that they be dealt with responsibly. Unfortunately, disturbing examples exist where companies have taken aggressive action to separate their…

Firm volatilities comove strongly over time, and their common factor is the dispersion of the economy-wide firm size distribution. In the cross section, smaller firms and firms with a more concentrated customer base display higher…

We provide the first systematic empirical evidence on factors that successfully mobilized one of the world’s first non-violent mass movements in favor of democratic self-government, using novel data from an unlikely venue for such collective…

Social norm perception is ubiquitous in small groups and teams, but how individuals approach this process is not well understood. When individuals wish to perceive descriptive social norms in a group or team, whose advice and behavior do…

Building on research showing that organizational practices that highlight the monetary value of time can affect decisions about time use, we examined how income and the economic evaluation of time jointly predict decisions about socializing with…

We propose a general framework, dubbed stochastic processing under imperfect information, to study the impact of information constraints and memories on dynamic resource allocation. The framework involves a stochastic processing network (SPN…

We study how ex ante information asymmetries affect revenue in common-value second-price auctions, motivated by online advertising auctions where “cookies” inform individual advertisers about advertising opportunities. We distinguish information…

We construct a measure of consumption-equivalent welfare for Black and White Americans. Our statistic incorporates life expectancy, consumption, leisure, and inequality. Based on this incomplete list of factors, welfare for Black Americans was 43…

We study the design of monitoring in dynamic settings with moral hazard. An agent (e.g. a firm) benefits from reputation for quality, and a principal (e.g. a regulator) can learn the agent’s quality via costly inspections. Monitoring plays…

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 new…

Cognitive reappraisal can benefit employees, in terms of their emotional health. However, we propose that reappraisal can also entail hidden costs. Drawing on social-functionalist emotions theory, we posit that the use of reappraisal to…

Under what conditions and how can a buying firm, by committing to publish a list of its suppliers and/or the identities and violations of terminated suppliers, increase its expected profit and supplier responsibility? This paper contributes to a…

How do protest actions impact public support for social movements? Here we test the claim that extreme protest actions — protest behaviors perceived to be harmful to others, highly disruptive, or both — typically reduce support for social…

The 2020 COVID-19 crisis can spur research on firms’ corporate finance decisions and their macroeconomic implications, similar to the wave of important research on banking and household finance triggered by the 2008 financial crisis. What are the…

Trade tensions, natural disasters, and the current global pandemic bring with them many challenges. Yet a variety of strategies, technologies, and digital innovations can help companies reduce risk and enhance supply chain resilience and agility…

While widely acknowledged in the cultural evolution literature, ecological factors — aspects of the physical environment that affect the way in which cultural productions evolve — have not been investigated experimentally. Here, we present an…