Publications

We survey 885 institutional venture capitalists (VCs) at 681 firms to learn how they make decisions. Using the framework in Kaplan and Strömberg (2001), we provide detailed information on VCs’ practices in pre-investment screening (sourcing…

The parasite stress hypothesis predicts that individuals living in regions with higher infectious disease rates will show lower openness, agreeableness, and extraversion, but higher conscientiousness. This article, using data from more than 250,…

Organizational leaders are increasingly turning to design approaches as a panacea for uncertainty and disruption. However, frictions between design and typical engineering and management practices make integrating design into organizations…

We establish currency as an important factor shaping global portfolios. Using a new security level dataset, we demonstrate that investor holdings are biased toward their own currencies to such an extent that countries typically hold most of the…

We develop a measure of how information events impact investors’ perceptions of firms’ riskiness. We derive this measure from an option-pricing model where investors anticipate an announcement containing information on the mean and variance of…

We develop an equilibrium theory of business cycles driven by spikes in risk premiums that depress business demand for capital and labor. Aggregate shocks increase firms’ uninsurable idiosyncratic risk and raise risk premiums. We show that risk…

Consider a researcher estimating the parameters of a regression function based on data for all fifty states in the United States or on data for all visits to a website. What is the interpretation of the estimated parameters and the standard…

Social insurance is often linked to marriage. Existing evidence suggests small marital responses to financial incentives and stems from settings where benefits are realized in the near future. I analyze how linking survivors insurance to marriage…

Recent advances in advertising technology have lead to the development of “native advertising,” which is a format of advertising that mimics the other nonsponsored content on the medium. Whereas advertisers have rapidly embraced the format on a…

We develop a valuation model for venture capital-backed companies and apply it to 135 US unicorns, that is, private companies with reported valuations above $1 billion. We value unicorns using financial terms from legal filings and find that…

For many machine learning algorithms, two main assumptions are required to guarantee performance. One is that the test data are drawn from the same distribution as the training data, and the other is that the model is correctly specified. In real…

Culture is easy to sense but hard to measure. The workhorses of culture research—employee surveys and questionnaires—are often unreliable. Studying the language that employees use in electronic communication has opened a new window into…

Advocacy is a topic of increasing import in the attitudes literature, but researchers know little to nothing about how people (i.e., persuaders) choose their targets (i.e., the recipients of their advocacy). Four main experiments and six…

Many U.S. corporations have frozen defined benefit pension plans, replacing new DB promises with contributions to defined contribution plans. We estimate expected DB accruals from the age-service and salary distributions of a large…

Retirement investing in the United States has changed dramatically. The classic defined benefit (DB) plan has largely been replaced by the defined contribution (DC) plan. With the latter, individual employees’ decisions about how much to save for…

There has been tremendous pressure on companies to satisfy stakeholder considerations as part of their long-term planning and governance. This activity is broadly categorized as ESG (environmental, social, and governance). 

This Quick…

We introduce a parsimonious framework for choosing among alternative expected-return proxies (ERPs) when estimating treatment effects. By comparing ERPs’ measurement-error variances in the cross-section and in time series…

The board of directors is responsible for ensuring the integrity of published financial statements. This includes working with management to set the parameters for accounting quality and internal controls, and retaining an external auditor to…